(15 February 2007 12:30 pm)

NEW DELHI: MTV India has decided to go digital in its marketing initiative for its new show Aila Tendulkar. No print ads, billboards or spots for this show. Riding the internet wave, the channel has looked at online banners and mobile content. The idea has been to capture viral circulation.

Aila Tendulkar is hosted by Suresh Menon aka VJ Tendulkar. The show has been launched with the cricket season in mind, especially with the approaching Cricket World Cup. The show launches on Saturday, 17 February, at 7 pm but will go on well past the World Cup until June.

Says MTV India VP marketing Aditya Swamy, "While the show is definitely in sync with the Cricket World Cup, we would also look at the post World Cup spillover and all the analysis and gossip that happens then."

The show format for Aila Tendulkar looks at a 5 to 7 minutes duration vignette and each vignette will have 3 to 4 cricket based gags/sketches. VJ Tendulkar is joined by Gag Chappel (Ashwin Mushran), the men in blue, Bowel Dravid (Kunal Kumar) and Kaurav Ganguly (Gaurav Gera). All this madness is of course monitored by VJ Cyrus Sahukar who cameos as the umpire.

A day before the telecast of the show, 30-45 second vignettes will be available on the mobile and net. The channel claims to be experimenting with the idea that a preview of the show will be made available before the actual telecast.

"In fact keeping in mind, its reach via digital formats, the show has also been produced to suit the medium. So no long shots, etc."

"The idea is to reach across to our target audience, which is metro youth and they are increasingly available on mobile and internet rather than on television. So we decided to market Aila Tendulkar across multiple platforms to get that 'constantly on the move viewer'.

All episodes of Aila Tendulkar would first break on mtvindia.com. Mobile users can simultaneously log on to wap.mtvindia.com from their GPRS-enabled phsones for the preview of these videos. MTV has tied up with Reliance, Hutch and Aitel for this service. The channel has also roped in Rediff, Google and Yahoo amongst others to feature these vignettes. Reliance mobile users can view the same on the MTV Zone on RWorld.

The post CAS situation has led to many channels reviewing their consumer performance and looking at different modes of media branding. MTV does have an international 'I want my MTV' campaign for subscription based channels. Commenting on this, Swamy said, "While there were plans to adapt this campaign in India as well, for now, we are just looking at how things are shaping up here."

The channel has also partnered with CNBC TV18 for a series of vignettes called MTV Budget Fundas to be aired on both the channels. Says Swamy, "MTV is not just about fun and humour but also everything relevant to the youth. So if the budget affects the pocket money of the youth and how they spend it, we will showcase it."