United Breweries has launched another web series called ‘What’s Your Status’ on its independent media platform Ultra Shorts on YouTube under the channel name Cheers. Within 10 days of its launch, the series has crossed two million viewers. The first episode of the web series went live on July 16, 2018 with new episode every Sunday after 5:00 pm.
‘What’s Your Status’ is a web series based on the story of three different people, going through three different phases of relationships – single, committed and married. According to Sandeep Balan, Head of Digital Marketing, UBL Group, the brand ‘Kingfisher Ultra’ plays the enabler in each of the stories and is subtly woven into situations that integrate naturally.
Balan said, “What’s Your Status has been great and really encouraging. We are closing in on two million views already within 10 days of launching the series with an extremely strong engagement. Both episodes were trending on YouTube for over 60 hours, with the latest one (Episode 2) touching #8 on the trending charts.”
Apart from being the marketing head for the brand, Balan is also the scriptwriter for the web series. He thinks that the lack of good stories is a big problem in the video content space. However, by keeping it relatable and real, he is trying to solve this problem.
“Everyone starts with an intention to tell a good story, but how relatable it ends up being for the viewer, determines how successful your show becomes. So, ‘relatability’ is the operating word here. It’s the viewer who labels it ‘good’ or ‘bad’ at the end of the show.
The attempt with ‘What’s Your Story’ has been to show the things exactly the way they are. So, you won’t see the single guy jumping into pool parties in the MBA college and dancing around the college campus once he falls in love. To tell a fun and entertaining story, showcasing real people and real emotions because at the end of the day, that’s what the brand DNA is all about,” said Balan.
‘Rise’ was the brand’s first experiment in web series. In a short of span of time, the brand has come a long way in their content game and so has their YouTube channel called Cheers. ‘Rise’ was nominated at the Los Angeles Web Festival and also won an award at the Sony studios, Hollywood.
“Our first web series, ‘Rise’, made a lot of people sit up and take notice of our channel. It came out at a time when the IT layoffs were a really hot topic and hence, it instantly connected with a large number of people. There’s hardly any content piece of ours where you won’t find comments from users asking for the next season of ‘Rise’. With some 40k subscribers on Cheers back then, we hardly had a subscriber base when we put Rise out there. It helped us build our audience and took us to our first significant channel milestone of 100k subscribers. We just scaled 300k subscribers and have over 37 million views on the channel,” said Balan.
Teasers of the webseries:
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