BizAsia talks to Leena Lele Dutta, Business Head – Sony YAY!
Sony YAY! has continued to strengthen its leadership position as India’s No.1 children’s entertainment channel. Across 2022, Sony YAY! successfully expanded its width of content with launches that included new seasons of the iconic
BizAsiaLive.com caught up with Leena Lele Dutta, Business Head – Sony YAY! about the success of the channel thusfar and plans going forward.
Sony YAY! has emerged a grand success with a fantastic 2022, how would you describe the journey?
On the onset, Sony YAY! is the number 1 kid’s entertainment channel and 2022 was a little special as we also celebrated 5 successful years in the industry. If I had to describe the journey of Sony YAY! in one word, I would say, it has been transformative. As a brand that caters to an extremely dynamic and ever evolving set of audience, every day is a learning experience for us. We pride ourselves on being able to understand not just our viewers but also the world they inhabit, their motivations, their likes, and dislikes, and of course, their aspirations. What we have built today, is not just a kid’s TV channel, but an entire ecosystem that is geared towards providing our young viewers a happy space, or as we like to call it, their ‘#Happyverse’. Here, they get to interact with their favourite toons through multiple touchpoints across their entire journey while consuming Sony YAY!. The last one year, especially, has been a year of transformation, fuelled by expansion and reinvention.
It is extremely satisfying to mention that over the last year, we have expanded our dynamic content line-up with more than 1000 hours of programming. We have also added new IPs like Ha.Go.La which is a story set in the Northern heartlands of the country and talks about three inanimate objects coming to life, new seasons of kids’ favourite shows like Oggy and the Cockroaches and Taarak Mehta Ka Chhota Chashmah, and the biggest title in the world of anime, Naruto, thereby expanding our audience base to include young adults. With a toon verse of over 100 characters, Sony YAY! has witnessed a growth of around 195% (GRP Growth from 2017 -2022) since our launch. To mention, our strategic partnerships which were led towards building an ecosystem of happiness for our audiences, we launched a Pet Rescue Agency at KidZania Mumbai and Delhi where kids role play rescue agents with an objective of empowering them to love and secure animals. Furthermore, we have also amped up our content on digital platforms through 9 YouTube channels that enjoys a subscriber base of over 15 million.
Our constant endeavour has been to create premium content for kids which is platform agnostic.
As well broadcasting your own productions, you forayed into content production with a show on Netflix, how did this come about?
When engaging with kids, it is important that your brand connects with them at every touchpoint and digital is a key platform today. Our constant endeavour has been to create premium content for kids which is platform agnostic. Our premier content venture for the digital medium, Sudha Murthy – Tales of Wit and Magic was created with this in mind. We are delighted that our offering was extremely well received by the audience. The show debuted on Netflix in 2022 and ranked amongst the top 10 kids’ shows on the platform within just few weeks of it launch.
With a vast range of digital platforms available globally, how important will Sony YAY!’s content production strategy be in 2023?
As a brand we are always looking at expanding our audience base and creating content across various genres which not only allows us to diversify our storytelling but also allows us to target newer audience segments. Thanks to our focus on creating and acquiring interesting content, we have an immense in-house expertise in understanding the audience preferences. We aim to further leverage our depth of understanding of the global market, its audience, and the genre to create more targeted content in 2023 for our channel and platforms beyond.
For 2023, we take ahead our initiative of new content production, as we have on the anvil, shows like “Karna: The Guardian,” an Indo Japanese co-production is a fresh take on the story of the character Karna from the Indian epic Mahabharata that aims to be an amalgamation of science and mythology and is targeted towards kids as well as adolescents. We also have an entertaining animated version of the popular show CID called “C.I.D. Squad” which will appeal to audiences young and old, given the familiarity with the characters and the love for the franchise. The debut of “Maya & the Magic Makeup Box,” which is a teen girl’s journey of self-discovery, we are bringing in diversity in the content while filling a gap in the animation industry where projects aimed at young girls are concerned, a market that we feel is underserved in the nation. Furthermore, our core audience, which is young children, will learn about the science of flying through engaging new fly-missions in every episode of the educational television programme “Young Aviators – ready for take-off.”
For us, the decision-making metrics for the content created for television and other platforms are different and exclusive to each other. The target audiences are very different for both these businesses.
How will you decide on selling content to other platforms without impacting the output of Sony YAY!?
Content Experts is what we would like to call ourselves today. Our belief to produce ‘Animation for all’ is because we are backed by a team that has the ability and the expertise to conceptualise newer concepts that are medium agnostic. While we say that, we are looking at both the linear business and the content production business as two independent entities at Sony YAY!. For us, the decision-making metrics for the content created for television and other platforms are different and exclusive to each other. The target audiences are very different for both these businesses.
When will viewers in international territories like the UK/US be able to watch Sony YAY! as a linear service?
Sony YAY! is available for viewers in USA, Canada, and Malaysia. We will keep you posted on any further developments as and when there is an update.
What’s in the pipeline for Sony YAY! in 2023?
For Sony YAY! 2023 is going to be about creating a #Happyverse, our latest positioning that builds an ecosystem of happiness and celebrates kids as they are. We are a brand that has always believed in being present where the kids are. As a kids’ entertainment brand, we know that when it comes to kids, it’s never just about launching a show or introducing a new character. To keep kids, entertained and engaged, we must become a part of their world – be present at every touchpoint, engage with them through every platform where they are present and create experiences that appeal to them. That is what #Happyverse is all about! It is going to be a year filled with new shows, new engagements, and some new toons. With exciting new episodes of well-loved shows such as Honey Bunny Reloaded and many more. 2023 is going to be an exciting year for viewers of Sony YAY!
