With the reality shows on television struggling with poor viewership and ratings, Colors TV seems to have finally found the recipe for success with the show Laughter Chefs. According to the Hindi General Entertainment Channel, GEC, the comedy show is topping the rating charts on the box and is placed as a popular show on JioCinema. Where the channel today claims to draw in 13.6 crore viewers on TV and Digital platforms alone, it recorded a rating of 1.8 in July. The show has received overwhelming impressions of 978 million on social media and 2.2 billion impressions and 966 million views on digital.
Being hosted by Bharti Singh with celebrity chef Harpal Singh Sokhi added to the mix, the premise is set for a madcap kitchen featuring the likes of Krushna Abhishek and Sudesh Lehri.
Since 2023, removing The Kapil Sharma Show from Sony TV has left a big void in the market for a comedy reality show that most channels have tried to fill but have gone unnoticed.
Alok Jain, president of general entertainment, Viacom18 says it’s an extremely difficult genre to master, with a very fine line of what will work with the masses and what won’t. Yet, from a consumer’s point of view, it is a very important genre, therefore channels continue to experiment with it.
It also favours advertisers, for few successes are found in this genre. But they do so with sceptical steps. Jain says, based on the low success rates of the comedy shows, they tend to hold their commitments and are better to wait for a show to be proved successful.
“But for comedy, a special opportunity is there because of the positive and involving environment it sets up for brand association. What’s more, there’s quite a safe and comfortable environment fostered for the audience, given the whole family-oriented spirit. Advertisers might recognize this, but they’re most likely rather awed and enormously careful at a distance,” he added.
However, the channel faced some hesitation in the number of advertisers that came on board to present this show. Although essentially being a comedy show where cooking was used as a prop, it saw brands related to cooking coming on board in a major way: Rajdhani Besan, Vim, Yippee Noodles, Kent RO, and Silver Coin Atta.
“We initially faced challenges on account of the inherent risk of a comedy show. As a result, we found that cooking-related brands, like groceries and flours, were more comfortable coming on board, thinking that even if the comedy didn’t resonate, the cooking aspect might still attract viewers. But the brand categories that work well for major shows like Bigg Boss are also effective here, ” he says.
But the show does not cut separate TV and digital episodes, or have a different set of brand sponsorships for each. It comes with a package deal, ensuring that brands access viewers on both TV and digital. More and more, this is what the channel wants because its audience is on both TV and digital, and most of the time, these are the same people.
Bucketing audiences into two separate entities—TV viewers and digital viewers—is called unwarranted by Jain. People go seamlessly across social media, OTT platforms, and television, sans there being any such clear bifurcation between TV and digital viewers. So if 70% of the audience is using all these mediums, we should create content that spans across them. It’s less about categorising by platform and more about understanding the nature of the content—some content is for individual viewing, while other content is for families. We need to evolve our approach to ensure that the same content crosses all platforms effectively,” he says.
The show also sees enormous viewership on social media platforms, reflecting its clips. This not only publicizes the show but also the brands, which again is favors the advertisement enactment as these are well knit with the content. In fact Jain jokes that for advertisers, it is a “Buy 2, Get 1 Free” offer considering the vast audience reach the platform of social media offers.
Though 1.8 is still a great rating for a Colors, which few other reality shows have managed in the last couple of years, the numbers are nowhere as close as in the pre-COVID-19 years. For instance, media reports suggest the average TRP for Bigg Boss 13 (2019) was 2.1-2.5 in a week.
Earlier, advertisers too had apprehensions of the low viewership of these reality shows.
Although Jain agreed that general television viewership had suffered a decline, he notified that for big shows, the numbers are always calculated with television and other digital platform impressions clubbed together.
“We look at the combined performance, which gives us a clear picture of how well the show is doing. There may be somewhat of a concern among advertisers, but television will remain the most efficient way to reach a mass audience. Still, the cost per viewer and total reach remains relatively better on TV. It’s challenging, but looking at the performance of the platform in concert with another helps us to strategize better. “For example, on non-fiction properties, which are generally higher cost, it turns into ‘how can we be most effective in our windowing of that property across the platforms, rather than the one platform,'” he explains.
The show had its premiere in June and was airing on Saturdays and Sundays at 9:30 pm. In August, due to a programming compromise for Khatron Ke Khiladi, the show was shifted from airing on Thursdays and Fridays at 10 pm. Jain reveals that it was a big risk when the time slot changed but that curve hasn’t made the difference in the ratings.
“A dip was, of course, expected. Indian viewers, traditionally, are typically more comfortable watching a non-fiction on the weekends. At the same time, one needs to also point out that moving a successful show to a weekday at a later hour — at that, a crucially important slot — was risky and doubly so for a non-fiction comedy show. But then again, the results have taken us by pleasant surprise. We have always believed that if good content is created, consumers will follow. This is a reminder that audiences are hungry for quality content,” he said.
