Jab We Sell

This has nothing to do with selling or buying of shares and has no relation with the share market. Any relation of words with those used in the share markets is purely coincidental.

This is about a movie. A movie that was a great hit. Of course the movie must be good in order to be a hit. But we know all good movies are not hit. And this 'okay' movie has achieved profits that can make any filmmaker jealous.

Actually this is not about the movie either. This is about marketing, about strategies and setting time frames of when to do what and how to earn the maximum possible money from the movie. This is about business. The business done in the film industry, and about the way it should be done.

Well, this is about 'Jab We Met'. A movie from which I was not hoping much when I went to Raghavendra, our only source of movies besides laptops. It was the first week and the publicity was such that movie was expected to be just time pass.

And that it really was. The movie did really well what it was expected to do - a good time pass, which gave the movie a good publicity through word of mouth. I mean, the results were exceptional in some way. Jab We Met was probably the only movie of the year that increased its collection after second week. Be it the masala filled Om Shanti Om or the touching Taare Zameen Par or the laugh riot Welcome, all have gone down on the box office, week after week. But Jab We Met was different from all these, increasing the number of viewers and thus profits.

On the other hand, the music score of the movie was already good and was being popular day by day. So no doubt the sale of audio CDs and cassettes was good, too.

And as soon as the theatres seemed to come to saturation, television started showing the 'coming soon' ads for the DVDs and VCDs. That too on Moserbaer, making it affordable for everyone, and since the movie came at a time when it was still fresh on people's mind, there were record sales of the DVDs and VCDs of the movie. The DVDs were promoted on TV with beautiful, touching advertisements that were showing less of movie and instead, were trying to move people through emotions of people.

I do not know whether these emotional ads added much to the sales but these were different from other movies' advertisements and people were noticing them.

And when everything was almost over, the box office, and the CDs and DVDs, the music and the movie, and when the movie was still 'new', the TV started showing advertisement for the 'television premier' of the movie. That is, the movie is gonna hit the idiot boxes this Sunday, which must have provided the producers with a few more crores as a hit movie is being aired so early.

I think the movie generated money in all the ways it could and that too in a short span of time. Probably because the strategists for the movie know that it's not an era of silver jubilee and golden jubilee and planned according to the short lifetime of current movies. I think the movie makers today should try to plan in such a manner that they are able to find maximum profits from all possible sources and for that, Jab We Met can be a great example.