Bang Bang Films Is Bringing the World to India, and Vice Versa
Roopak Saluja is taking his global agency expertise and marrying it with a new take on TVC and content production in India. Will he be the next Jon Kamen? Stay tuned.
World to India, and Vice Versa
Managing Director Roopak Saluja is taking his global ad expertise
and marrying it with a cutting edge take on TVC and content
production. Will he end up as the Jon Kamen of India? Stay tuned.
By Anthony Vagnoni
Roopak Saluja likes to call Bang Bang Films "India's international production company," and he certainly has the cred to call it that. A former agency account supervisor who's worked in Europe, his four-year old production company is moving aggressively to bring top directors to not just the Indian agency community, but to agencies and marketers throughout Asia as well.
A recent example of his move in this area is its co-production agreement with the US and UK-based Believe Media, which was recently announced jointly by Saluja, who is Bang Bang's Co-Founder and Managing Director, and Luke Thornton, Executive Producer and Partner at Believe. (For more on this news, click here.) Bang Bang represents all the Believe directors in the States and London throughout the Asia/Pacific region.
The shop has also worked with other American, English and European directors - talents like Nic & Sune and Jim Sonzero - and prides itself on gently moving its clients in India towards a more international flavor of filmmaker. That said, Saluja also has a quintet of native Indian directors on staff at Bang Bang, to better handle a wider range of work and make sure he has solutions for any type of project.
The shop was formed in 2006 by Saluja and his partner, Kirk Dias, who, despite his name, is Indian. A respected member of the local production community, he was a top-rank line producer prior to co-founding Bang Bang. Saluja comes from a different background: he was Account Director on Motorola for Ogilvy in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, where he regularly collaborated with his counterparts in the US and UK. Prior to that, he was with Y&R in Eastern Europe, where he worked on Kraft, Danone and Ericsson.
Saluja quit the agency side of the business, enrolled in the INSEAD business school in Paris, then returned to India after getting his MBA to set up a company in the media and entertainment space. The result is Bang Bang, a venture that lets him keep a foot in both worlds, that of content production and working with global brands. In New York in October to attend the AICP Conference, Saluja told SourceEcreative that the reason he teamed up with Diaz is that they both view India as a growing market that's in need of change. Its industry is dominated by director-owned production companies, but he and Dias intend to import the producer-owned paradigm to the country and instill a more professional approach to partnering with agencies.
"We're building a production brand here at Bang Bang," he says, adding that he considers companies like @radical.media and RGA as inspirations.
Indeed, Saluja must be on to something. Bang Bang's been on something of a roll, and is making news in its home market in ways most TVC production companies can only dream of. It was recently came in second on a list of the 25 fastest-growing start-ups in India by AllWorld Network (for more in this development, click here), a global firm that's building the world's largest entrepreneurship network and information system. Co-founded by a trio of experts on the science of entrepreneurism affiliated with Harvard University's Kennedy School for Business and Government, AllWorld identifies the world's fastest-growing companies in all regions and market sectors globally.
Since opening, Bang Bang has produced work for a roster of global brands including Nokia, Pepsi, Axe, L'Oreal, Johnson & Johnson, Sony, Volkswagen, Fiat and more. They've also worked for Indian marketers, such as the airline IndiGo, producing upbeat and cheeky work that people have noticed.
Taking the Bang Bang approach a step further, Saluja and Dias created a division in 2009 that's designed to produce multimedia work across platforms. Called Jack in the Box, it's a reflection of the partners' grasp of how creativity and technology have to coexist in the age of digital media and content. Since it's opening they've handled projects for Puma, Condé Nast and the US-based retail chain Forever 21.
The most recent Jack in the Box effort for Puma work is a good example of what the shop is able to do. The promotion, dubbed "Pimp My Sole," which is detailed in this video clip, featured traveling and point-of-sale interactive events, videos, still photography and social networking components.
The brief from Puma was to drive awareness and traffic to the Puma store in the Khar neighborhood of Mumbai on Independence Day weekend, using a "Freedom of Expression" theme to encourage young shoppers to design their own soles. Winning designs in "The Sole Fight" competition would then become part of Puma's 2011 Spring/Summer Flip Flop Collection - think of it as user-generated footwear - with the designers' names appearing on the shoes.
"The objective was to create awareness for the Linking Road store and to establish a connection with the creative fraternity of Mumbai," explains Rajiv Mehta, Managing Director of Puma Sport India. "Working with us on our side rather than just being a partner, Jack in the Box executed our broader theme with a lot of creativity, attention to detail and personal involvement."
The company expanded the Puma concept beyond an in-store event to take the brand to the streets where its consumers hang out, Saluja explains. To do so, they bought a vintage Ambassador, a classic Indian automotive workhorse, painted it white, christened it the "Sole Machine," then drove it to cafes, streets and schools. Young Indian hipsters were then invited to grab a can of spray paint and tag the automobile with colorful graffiti.
Over an eight-day period last August the "Sole Machine" visited more than 15 venues, updating the brand's audience via Twitter about the next stop on its tour. It caught on, Saluja notes - more than 3,000 people painted the car, which had to be repainted white by the fourth day, so that even more people could tag it. Thousands of leaflets promoting the contest were distributed.
A Jack in the Box video crew traveling with the Ambassador captured young consumers tagging it and posing with a pair of giant Puma shoe props, and an editing team then cut videos of the activities on location and posted them on the Puma Facebook page and on YouTube every day. In turn, people started tagging themselves on the Facebook pictures, and telling their friends to check them out. Some even made their Puma pictures their profile shots.
During the Sole Machine's travels it made a stop at the Mumbai office of MTV, the network that first aired "Pimp My Ride," the car customization show that was the inspiration for the promotion. The media responded, too, with coverage on the websites of CNN, GQ and HT Café.
During the course of the campaign, says Saluja, eight million impressions were generated. In fact, he claims, for a period of time India became the number one fan base for Puma worldwide on Facebook. The campaign rolled out in Bangalore in September, and there's talk of taking it to other regions as well.
Was the client happy? Puma's Mehta reports that the campaign objectives "were met with great success. The store visibility has markedly increased, as seen from walk-ins as well as sales figures. Jack in the Box's use of online social media platforms such as Facebook and YouTube gave a great push to the campaign's voice, making it reach the target audience with ease in a language that they understood."
"Puma's 'Pimp Your Sole' is just one example of the kind of cool stuff we're able to do as an all-in-one content creation and production outfit," says Saluja.
Adds Prashanth Challapalli, who runs the Jack in the Box unit, "This was a great example of how to create branded content by fusing an on-the-ground event with video and online seeding, resulting in a huge viral wave. The real success is that the brand has succeeded in inspiring its core audience in 'co-creating' not just content, but the product itself."
So what about that Jon Kamen business? Might not be that far off. Saluja, a stylish and energetic guy who doubles as a nightclub DJ in what little spare time he has, is already working on a branded content TV series. It stars his wife, the Indian actress Tara Sharma, and chronicles the travails of traveling with babies around the world - something with which both he and his wife have firsthand experience, becoming new parents in 2009. Saluja sold a sponsorship for the show, titled "The Tara Sharma Show-Diaries of a New Mum," to Fisher-Price, and they're in production now. The show is slated to run on Indian TV, but don't be surprised if you see Saljua and his family - or at least the Bang Bang credits - coming to a screen near you soon.
Published 2 December, 2010
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