Mumbai: In the age of publicity stunts and the psychobabble of television and radio advertising, if marketing wizards are to be believed, the audience is numb. Music videos, trailers and hundreds of glossy posters that pound our senses everyday are no longer enough. And that’s why this season, movie-goers will see new things, whether they like it or not.
We recently saw Ram Gopal Verma’s Phoonk up for takes to one daring viewer who would sit through the entire movie all alone in a cinema hall. The prize was a whopping Rs 5 lakh. In 2006, Percept Picture Company did a Maha Aarti for Ahmed Siddiqui’s Jai Santoshi Maa. Come 2008, the ideas that are being proposed would put anything that came before to shame.
Anurag Kashyap’s much anticipated fourth venture Dev D, a modern take on Devdas, tops the list of publicity stunts. On December 21, UTV Spotboy launched the film’s official website with a special ‘lust-line’ where newbie Kalki Koechlin—who plays the temptress Chandramukhi in the film— hosted a chat-line where callers can call in and talk dirty in four different languages. “The chat-line will be online so that we can control the timings instead of having people call in all the time on a phone. Besides, Kalki has the option to stop chatting if it gets uncomfortable,” says Kashyap. While the logic and morality quotient behind such a mode may miss many, Kashyap explains: “The lust-line is completely in sync with the mood of the movie. It’s a film about young people and changing morality. Someone needs to question this notion of ‘Indian morality’. Besides, there are always going to be flags raised when it comes to any film that attempts to break conventions.”
But with Dev D, Shikha Kapoor, marketing head at UTV Spotboy charting an ‘organic’ publicity method, the images guarantee to invade our consciousness in a way never seen since the days of Titanic. “We hope to tap into every sphere the youth inhabit. So we’ll be going to all the big cities and having drinking competitions, unveiling a range of denims and other merchandise, tattoos and maybe even a range of Dev D condoms,” Kapoor adds.
But then, not all publicity is good publicity. And sometimes it backfires, as in the case of Ghajini. While Aamir Khan had bald clones for ushers at Big Cinema, the films hoped for a similar promotion campaign with an exclusive range of tattoos, theme-based PC and mobile phone games, fashion shows and life-size statues of Khan at multiplexes. But things went wrong when a phone number tattooed on Khan’s body in the film happened to belong to a film distributor; he apparently sent a legal notice to Ghajini’s producers.
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