Entertainment
‘Kabali’ creates a new concept in brand promotion
Chennai : Tamil movie super star Rajinikanth is not known to have endorsed any product or service but the frenzy of brands and corporates associating with the Tamil movie “Kabali” seems to throw up a new concept in brand promotion, said a brand consultant.
“It is a clever way of riding on the excitement of a big movie starring a very big hero who has not endorsed any product or service. But in the commercials of the brands associated with ‘Kabali’, there are a few scenes from the movie featuring only Rajinikanth and a voice-over about the product,” Ramanujam Sridhar, founder and Chief Executive Officer, Brand Comm, a brand consulting company, told IANS over phone from Bengaluru.
“Nowhere in the commercials of such brands, the hero was seen to endorse the product or talks about the product,” Sridhar added.
Normally an advertisement for a movie will feature the images of hero, heroine, villain and music director.
If the product commercials are actually a promotion for the movie “Kabali”, the brand owners have leveraged only Rajinikanth’s image in the movie with some movie clippings.
However, the brand owners do leverage Rajinikanth’s title ‘superstar’ in their commercials and also his movie image.
For instance, Cadbury Five Star “Kabali” commercial, though featuring the Ramesh-Suresh characters, has some scenes from the movie and ends with the tag line ‘Superstar’s Five Star”.
AirAsia, the official airline partner for “Kabali” announced ‘Fly like a Superstar’ promotion.
On the other hand, Kerala-based company Muthoot Fincorp partnered with movie to roll out exclusive silver coins with an embossed image of Rajinikanth as seen in the movie.
Of all the brands that are associated with the movie “Kabali”, it is Emami’s `Fair and Handsome’ brand for fairness cream that would make one’s eyebrows raise.
There have been songs and dialogues in Rajinikanth’s movies praising his dark skin.
Here, a skin fairness cream gets associated with Rajinikanth’s movie and its commercial also features scenes from the “Kabali” movie.
Sridhar says the movie seems to have started a new concept called “surrogate endorsement”.
“There have been commercials for brands with mimicking the voice of celebrities. It is not known whether any celebrity whose voice was mimicked had taken up the issue legally,” Sridhar said.
“Similarly, the ‘Kabali’ advertisements could be termed as akin to that but the celebrity’s image is replaced by the mimicked voice,” he added.
Brand owners associated with “Kabali” movie said that Rajinikanth is not endorsing their products or service.
International online casino Casino Days has published a report sharing their internal data on what types and brands of devices are used to play on the platform by users from the South Asian region.
Such aggregate data analyses allow the operator to optimise their website for the brands and models of devices people are actually using.
The insights gained through the research also help Casino Days tailor their services based on the better understanding of their clients and their needs.
Desktops and Tablets Lose the Battle vs Mobile
The primary data samples analysed by Casino Days reveal that mobile connections dominate the market in South Asia and are responsible for a whopping 96.6% of gaming sessions, while computers and tablets have negligible shares of 2.9% and 0.5% respectively.
The authors of the study point out that historically, playing online casino was exclusively done on computers, and attribute thе major shift to mobile that has unfolded over time to the wide spread of cheaper smartphones and mobile data plans in South Asia.
“Some of the reasons behind this massive difference in device type are affordability, technical advantages, as well as cheaper and more obtainable internet plans for mobiles than those for computers,” the researchers comment.
Xiaomi and Vivo Outperform Samsung, Apple Way Down in Rankings
Chinese brands Xiaomi and Vivo were used by 21.9% and 20.79% of Casino Days players from South Asia respectively, and together with the positioned in third place with a 18.1% share South Korean brand Samsung dominate the market among real money gamers in the region.
Cupertino, California-based Apple is way down in seventh with a user share of just 2.29%, overshadowed by Chinese brands Realme (11.43%), OPPO (11.23%), and OnePlus (4.07%).
Huawei is at the very bottom of the chart with a tiny share just below the single percent mark, trailing behind mobile devices by Motorola, Google, and Infinix.
The data on actual phone usage provided by Casino Days, even though limited to the gaming parts of the population of South Asia, paints a different picture from global statistics on smartphone shipments by vendors.
Apple and Samsung have been sharing the worldwide lead for over a decade, while current regional leader Xiaomi secured their third position globally just a couple of years ago.
Striking Android Dominance among South Asian Real Money Gaming Communities
The shifted market share patterns of the world’s top smartphone brands in South Asia observed by the Casino Days research paper reveal a striking dominance of Android devices at the expense of iOS-powered phones.
On the global level, Android enjoys a comfortable lead with a sizable 68.79% share which grows to nearly 79% when we look at the whole continent of Asia. The data on South Asian real money gaming communities suggests that Android’s dominance grows even higher and is north of the 90% mark.
Among the major factors behind these figures, the authors of the study point to the relative affordability of and greater availability of Android devices in the region, especially when manufactured locally in countries like India and Vietnam.
“And, with influencers and tech reviews putting emphasis on Android devices, the choice of mobile phone brand and OS becomes easy; Android has a much wider range of products and caters to the Asian online casino market in ways that Apple can’t due to technical limitations,” the researchers add.
The far better integration achieved by Google Pay compared to its counterpart Apple Pay has also played a crucial role in shaping the existing smartphone market trends.
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