MUMBAI: It isn’t India’s number one youth brand for nothing. One look at MTV’s latest trade campaign and you know why it leads the brat pack in both marketing and programming.

One message reads: “Cooking three billion Maggi packets and watching MTV takes the same time”. A video film goes on to explain how you can feed the whole of Pakistan plus Bangladesh by cooking for 1 billion minutes, but MTV is way bigger because it was consumed online for 6 billion minutes last year, which is also the time it takes to cook three billion packets of Maggi.

Another one states: “Fuel prices have grown but not as fast as MTV’s viewership”. Even here, MTV has trumped the ever-growing fuel prices by actually doubling its viewership over the past one year.

The third message goes: “The football World Cup was big - almost as big as the Roadies”. The film conveys how MTV Roadies was watched by 133 million Indians as compared to the 2018 Football World Cup which was viewed only by 111 million Indians.

A fourth one says: “MTV’s footprint is bigger than the population of the USA”. The video drives home the point that USA stands for everything big, including its population of 330 million, outdone only by MTV whose footprint is over 454 million.

All the messages have one goal – to make you believe that “It’s way bigger than you imagined.”

Having kicked-off on 12 November, the ad campaign, ran for three straight weeks across multiple trade agencies in Mumbai, Delhi and Bangalore. It involved the use of high-impact inventory such as cafeteria facade, LED wall branding, LED screens, lift branding, DIGIPODS and tent cards on every desk.

Held at the Group M Cafeteria in Mumbai and Delhi on 29 November and 30 November respectively, the campaign saw engagement through games, using a life-size JENGA and JALEBI that lasted for about an hour and a half. 

Not only media buying agencies across India but also work spaces of major spend brands such asBMW, Ford, GSK, Google and Pepsi got a taste of MTV’s bigness.

While rival channels in the youth genre have struggled to keep the youngsters hooked, this dynamic channel from the Viacom18 stable has found the secret sauce. The fact that season after season of its top shows like Roadies and Splitsvilla keep returning goes on to show the channel’s proved it knows how to take the pulse of the youth.