Roadies Season 18 – Soaring audience engagement via social media strategies

Roadies is one of the most engaging and biggest shows on MTV with a total of 18 seasons so far. With a new host and astounding concept, the latest installation of the youth-based reality show was different from the last 17 seasons. The season was being held in South Africa, and was called “Roadies – Journey in South Africa”. It comprised 10 Ex Roadies and 10 New Roadies who played like a buddy pair to win the season.  #ARM Worldwide and MTV joined hands to heavily promote MTV Roadies – Journey in South Africa on social media and engage with a wider audience base.  MTV Roadies is a show that has a huge fan base, not just to watch the show but also on digital platforms because of the exclusive content and digital-led ideas. Keeping in mind the fan craze for the show, #ARM Worldwide team decided to think out-of-the-box for the client to drive maximum engagement and create a huge buzz on digital platforms. 

Challenges

The social media and content marketing team at #ARM Worldwide identified two major challenges while planning the campaign. 

1. Creating a unique buzz on social media platforms given that previous seasons had set expectations at par.
2. Driving maximum engagement on social media to make the concluding season a superhit show. 

Strategies devised

We, at #ARM Worldwide, approached the challenges with four-pronged strategies: 

1. Creating an AR filter to engage audiences on digital platforms. 
2. Creating different content buckets to interact with the audience and leveraging the right platform.
3. Organizing a digital show for Roadies digital host – All Access Star. 
4. The promising face to host the season and at the same time a personality to resonate with the audience.

Putting ideas into execution

To create a huge buzz around the campaign, #ARM Worldwide leveraged the introduction of a new host in the season 18 – Sonu Sood – to captivate the attention of the audience. The personalized linkage promo with him was released in 4 different languages - Hindi, English, Telugu and Tamil. Our team created an interactive AR filter as per the theme of the season to interact with the audience and create a buzz around the latest season of the reality TV show.  Additionally, our team included creating different content buckets to interact with the audience via all the best form of content from static to motion, meme to contest to drive max interaction and engagement across social media platforms as well as partner platforms.  The digital show, called All Access Star, was a 5 episode contest hosted by Arjun Kanungo and VJ Gaelyn. The contest aimed to find a host for the digital show of Roadies Season 18. The contestants were assigned different tasks in each episode, and the final winner would win a trip to South Africa. The episode was aired during the weekends only, but the digital audience was kept engaged with Promos, Memes, Shandaar Shanivaar, etc. throughout the week.This bought wholesome engagement with fans on social media to find the next digital face. 

Results

With collaborative efforts, #ARM Worldwide achieved massive results in creating digital awareness and engaging the audience for MTV Season 18.  Introducing Sonu Sood fetched 83Mn + impressions and 10MN+ views across social media platforms in the promo itself. The digital show “All Access Star” solely resulted in 32.8 Mn+ Impressions, 29.5 Mn+ Reach,6 Mn+ Views & 7.7 Mn+ Engagement. The digital performance of Roadies season 18 resulted in 292 Mn+ Impressions , 226 Mn+ Reach, 90 Mn+ Engagements & 86 Mn+ Views across platforms including Gaana, Glance, Roposo, Instagram, Snapchat, twitter, Facebook, and Youtube.