Sony has been a dominant force in India’s entertainment industry for the past 30 years. However, the landscape has evolved significantly since its entry into the market, and the future holds even more transformation.
To explore the company’s path forward, CNBC-TV18 spoke with Gaurav Banerjee, MD & CEO of Sony Pictures Networks India.
Below are the excerpts of the interview.
Q: You have completed six months at Sony. Before that, you’ve had a stellar career and also known as the content King. So, when you joined, what were your thoughts about Sony, and six months in, what are your thoughts? What do you think about the future here?
Banerjee: I was really excited to walk into this office six months ago. This was the first time that I was stepping into the offices here, or any Sony office. And I was excited because this company has meant so much to Indian consumers for so many years, and it’s such an amazing global brand.
Of course, personally for me, when you enter the corporate world, when you enter the media world, you hope, one day, you aspire to hopefully have an opportunity to lead a team, to lead a company. So, this company gave me that opportunity. So, I have been excited from that day. It has been a great last six months. Very, very excited with what the team has been able to achieve in such a short time. But also, of course, very excited about the plans that we have for the future.
Q: Give me specifics. When you joined here, what were you looking at and in the last six months, what have your initial thoughts been?
Banerjee: When I came in here, one of the big ideas that I was wanting to work on is the content philosophy here. You called me the content king, I am certainly not that, but I am a student of content, and I’m very proud of the fact that I actually went to a film school and spent my entire life thinking about stories and making shows.
I spent seven years working in news channels where I used to anchor, produce shows. I have done many of the jobs that you do growing up and sort of building a career from the first level in and therefore, what I wanted this company to be known for is its creativity, its content, the selections that we do. And therefore, one of the big things that was sort of hurting us as a company is that our flagship channel, SET, had not been doing that well. It had an indifferent last three years. And therefore, I wanted to ideally work with the team to figure out, how do we stop that decline and hopefully turn it around.
Q: So, what were the things that you did, what were the decisions over the last six months?
Banerjee: So, the first decision was, we felt that Sony had a very distinct, unique identity. It was known for a particular kind of shows, and some of that identity had got diluted, and there was a lot of programming there which I felt was indifferent, but much more than that, it was kind of not differentiated. And we sort of said, that’s not for us. We’re going to clean that out, and we’re going to go back to reiterate the original, iconic positioning of SET.
Q: Which is what?
Banerjee: So, the original, iconic positioning of SET is a lot of content that is not your regular daily soap kind of content. So, this is content that men and women can watch together, and it is also about a lot of iconic IPs that have got created. So, one of the first shows that we chose to launch is a show that we brought back after six years, CID. It’s a great brand, it’s an amazing franchise that has existed for over two decades. The new season, when it launched, was the best fiction show launch on the channel in the last six, seven years.
So, the other thing that we have done is really polish the existing brands that were with us. So, we did an amazing launch for Indian Idol and the ratings of that show are some 30% higher than the previous season. So, a bunch of these things have meant that the channel, which was roughly in the early 50s in July, is doing in the late 80s today. So, we have seen almost a 70% increase in ratings.
So, I was keen that we, we get behind distinguished brands and show some results which are kind of in the public domain. And therefore, people inside this building believe that we can work really hard, we can work in a Sony way, and we can establish some good wins in the marketplace.
Q: What is the Sony way?
Banerjee: We have to be very focused on our brand. We have to be building our IP, and we have to be doing things which are different from what others are doing. And we must believe in quality. So, I think those three, four, very simple principles are what we have tried to do across a range of brands now and we’ve seen some great results on SET.
On Sony Sab, our other really big GEC, we have had a great launch to Tenali Rama, which is the best fiction show that Sony Sab has launched in the last six years. And therefore, that channel has also grown.
On Sony Liv, we decided to make Shark Tank, which is one of our most successful shows, exclusive to Liv alone. And that has also seen a big jump in viewership, particularly from smaller cities and on connected TVs. So, I think across our big content channels on TV and digital, we’ve taken a few focused bets on some really great, iconic brands, and really look to grow their viewership in a big, substantive way, in a way where the data and the consumer love speaks for itself.
Watch accompanying video for entire conversation.
