Malaysian Media Awards Winners Showcase

Objective & Challenge
Disney+ Hotstar was finally going to launch in Malaysia with a lot of fanfare among audiences given the lockdown situation and the lack of entertainment options locally. Abiding by the COVID-related protocols, shoot delays and production hiccups were inevitable, causing a huge content shortage in the nation. Having said that, the launch of Disney+ Hotstar was expected to not be very well received by local players like Media Prima and Astro because of its competitive nature. The platform had the ability to impact Astro’s subscriptions and Media Prima audiences’ time spent on terrestrial TV.

Insight & Strategy
The task at hand was to determine which platform would be best suited for us to partner with, to ensure scale among the masses in a strategic way. Here are some of the key insights from some of the research work. TV – Astro carries significant reach on TV (55%), but MP comfortably beats Astro’s numbers (68%). Furthermore, almost 80% of Astro audiences watch MP stations. Advantage: MP Radio: Astro has a significant advantage on the platform due to the strength of their stations like Era FM. All radio stations from MP like Hot FM rank well below the top stations from Astro in terms of reach. Advantage: Astro Digital: Rev Asia has very extensive digital coverage across all genres and vernaculars through Says, OhBulan, Sirap Limau etc. Advantage: MP OOH: Through Big Tree, MP has a very wide coverage of OOH, particularly in major cities. Meanwhile, Astro has almost no OOH presence. Advantage: MP News: MP has very credible and high-reach news outlets like Buletin Utama (TV3), Mandarin News (8TV), Harian Metro (Print and Online) etc. Meanwhile, Astro has Astro Awani under its wing – while it is credible, it lacks the reach of MP news platforms. Advantage: MP Based on the above evaluation across platforms, it was abundantly clear that for our launch to be successful, we had to collaborate with Media Prima on a 360-degree level on the media front given their strength on TV and Digital.

Execution
Our collaboration with Media Prima spanned across all their touchpoints be it TV, Radio, Print, Digital, and even OOH for our launch. While we did continue hygiene buys across all their platforms, here are some of the clutter-breaking executions that helped to drive impact and visibility: TV: News was a hot topic during launch with viewership on Buletin Utama and Mandarin News at an all-time high. We wanted to take a piece of the hype. On launch day, we unveiled “Breaking News” across all 4 MP stations every hour. The execution mirrored the look and feel of a news set and announced breaking news that Disney+ Hotstar has officially launched in Malaysia and showcased all our 4 content pillars. Digital: Across 8 top digital platforms under Media Prima like Says, OhBulan, Harian Metro etc., we executed a first-of-its-kind 100% takeovers. This entailed: 1. Takeover of the Masthead with Disney+ Hotstar colours 2. Changing the name of the platforms as Disney+ Hotstar 3. A branded bar at the bottom with our brand colours and our brand message 4. A floating widget with D+ branding 5. No advertisers are allowed on any of MP’s digital platforms during our launch day Every single page of the 8 MP platforms had the above-mentioned treatment to ensure mass scale. Radio: There was a total takeover of all MP radio stations. All radio stations were branded as “Disney+ Hotstar FM” across radio and their digital ecosystems (FB, Twitter, and Tik Tok). Furthermore, aside from a total branding change, all songs played during the launch were from Disney’s content library exclusively. OOH: Disney+ Hotstar became the first official 3D DOOH advertiser on Big Tree’s newest screen opposite the high traffic KLCC junction. In fact, the screen’s construction was expedited to accommodate our launch date. The collaboration with Media Prima was the biggest of its kind with its mix of highly innovative, clutter-breaking slate of executions across all their platforms.

Effectiveness
The campaign turned out to be an astronomical success from both, the media perspective and business results perspective as well. Cumulatively, the collaboration with Media Prima enabled us to reach more than 75% of our target audience on the day of the launch alone (cumulative reach as per agency’s proprietary all-platform tool). Here are some of the key success metrics: 1. The “Breaking News” execution on TV delivered a reach of 58% in a day. 2. Audiences on Twitter kept tweeting about how much they loved the Disney takeover on MP radio 3. The digital takeovers (that we pioneered!) were so effective from a visibility perspective that Media Prima has started selling them as a regular buy – a buy that some of our competitors have been buying (Netflix for Money Heist and Warner Brothers for Batman) for impact 4. Our 3D Digital Billboard was a huge hit – it became the talk of town across social platforms and gained traction in news. Furthermore, seeing the impact, the execution was replicated by Thailand and Australia for their respective D+ launches From a business standpoint, Disney+ Hotstar launch aided by a partnership with Media Prima turned out to be a huge success story. The response was so overwhelming, that the huge influx of traffic crashed our entire back-end tech ecosystem. Normally, we’d consider that to be a major debacle, but considering that this signaled the high demand we created, we took this as a compliment. Even the ex-Malaysian PM, Najib Razak, tweeted and FB-ed about the platform crash. Not every day do you get a shout-out from an ex-PM. The interests we generated in the platform were unimaginable. We were able to achieve 50% of the yearly subscription target within the first week of launch. According to Comscore, in the first month of the Disney+ Hotstar launch, we were able to achieve the highest number of minutes consumption for any OTT platforms – beating long-established players like Netflix, Viu, iFlix and iQiyi. Finally, it feels amazing to have made a small contribution to entertaining Malaysians during a period of lockdowns.