Uday Shankar of Star India talks about the channel’s collaboration with TED for ‘TED Talks India Nayi Soch’ to be aired on Star Plus. Santosh Padhi of Taproot Dentsu talks about bagging the Country Agency of the year title at Spikes Asia
TED TALKS IN HINDI ON STAR PLUS IS A CREATIVE BREAKOUT PROPOSITION IN MEDIA: UDAY SHANKAR
Star India has collaborated with TED for ‘TED Talks India Nayi Soch’ on Star Plus hosted by Shah Rukh Khan. This is TED’s first collaboration with a major network to produce a television series featuring original TED Talks in a language other than English. Here’s what Uday Shankar, Chairman and CEO, Star India said at the launch event:
ON TED TALKS: At Star India, we have channelized our energy and resources to come up with something that will challenge the established stereotype of creativity and content for entertainment television. TED Talks on Star Plus is an outcome of that. We are very satisfied to bring an idea as eclectic, diverse and intense on TV in a language which is not considered a means of mass communication for intellectual ideas even in this country. We are proud to bring it in Hindi.
THE CHALLENGE: What TED offers is also an outcome of what regular Television or Print media don’t offer. So we thought, if at all it was possible for Star to step into that space and work with TED to bring all those ideas worth spreading and make them accessible to a whole group of people who didn’t have access to them. Regardless of the power and popularity of TED there was one thing that wasn’t happening: people who couldn’t appreciate or consume content in the English language were left out of benefiting from TED. So we thought we could persuade the TED team to consider what we were proposing to do. It’s their remarkable vision and the commitment that they were open to the idea. Here we are today with probably the most exciting creative breakout proposition in the mainstream media today in the world.
ON SHAH RUKH KHAN: That person had to have known intellect that doesn’t easily come to anyone. We also realized that this person really has to get excited about the power of an idea before we could make the power of the idea come alive on Star Plus. When we started engaging with that challenge, the list turned out to be really short with just one name, none other than SRK. He is probably the only person who really epitomizes the intellectual and creative curiosity that goes way beyond what he does on a daily basis.
WE DIDN’T EXPECT TO WIN SOMETHING AS BIG AS COUNTRY AGENCY OF THE YEAR AT SPIKES ASIA: SANTOSH PADHI
Taproot Dentsu (earlier Taproot) has previously won two Grand Prix at the Spikes Asia, so while their hat-trick this year for ‘Adidas Odds’ by all means gave the agency reason to celebrate, what stunned everyone including Santosh Padhi, Co-founder of Taproot Dentsu was bagging the ‘Country Agency of the Year’ title. Here, Padhi talks about the win at the recently held awards in Singapore.
ON WINNING THE ACCOLADE: None of us from the team ended up going to the awards function because we genuinely didn’t expect to win something this big, that too after McCann WorldGroup bagged 13 metals at the same forum. We won 10 but scored higher. Awards are important for an agency of our size, because it gives us a chance to show our muscle power and compete with the giants like Ogilvy, Leo Burnett and McCann. There are a lot of insecurities in this creative business, so only when a competitor sits on the jury and applauds your work, you know how good you are.
CANNES DAMPENER: Despite the letdown at Cannes, we didn’t compromise on the entries sent to Spikes Asia. In fact, out of 33 countries that participated, only eight countries were awarded ‘Country Agency of the Year’ award’ in 2017 at Spikes Asia, so it is not that by default one agency gets it in each country. Interestingly, even at the Adfest, Adidas Odds was the only Integrated Gold from India which missed the Grand Prix. But we made up for it by winning at Spikes Asia. In fact, since the time of Taproot’s inception, no campaign has got as many awards on local and international platforms as the ‘Adidas Odds’ campaign.
(As told to Neeta Nair)
