Entrepreneurship and Content Marketing-Challenges
Gulshan Singh (Batch of 2010)
Though I initially started with a clear understanding of being a filmmaker, somewhere in my journey, entrepreneurship caught up with me and this was not the first time I would reorient myself. But there was one significant difference this time. Earlier, my reorientations were not my choice, they were rather due to my inability to carry on towards my previous goals, be it my pursuit of being a medical professional or academics. However, this time, choosing the entrepreneurial route was a very conscious choice, I wanted to couple it with my desire to be a filmmaker. Hence, I began this from my college days itself. I started making short films and documentaries in college and then pitched my new ideas in the annual entrepreneurship fair of my college.
By the time I passed out of my college, the digital age had ushered in and an entirely new market for digital content came into existence which was evolving rapidly for the initial few years as internet and mobile phone kept on becoming more and more affordable. As a result, the pattern and quantity of internet consumption reached a point which was earlier unknown. It took me some time to understand the whole thing, which I did by being a part of this industry. I started Ex Nihilo Creations in 2018 and since then it has been a new learning every day, some sweet and some sour. Currently as COVID pandemic is raging globally, it has altered the content space, the whole idea of content creation and distribution has been reshaped, creating new business opportunities and challenges.
So far I have directed television commercials and corporate films for brands like Hitachi, Pergo, HP, Acko, GMR etc. Apart from these, I have created an online platform named Muntazir for producing digital content. In this adda, I have talked about everything that I have learned as a filmmaker and an entrepreneur with an idea that it should give a sneak-peek into the business of digital content creation.
With the ever increasing size and dynamic nature of the market of digital content, one of the main challenges for any digital media business is to forge a lasting relationship with discriminating consumers. Since consumers are spoiled by the available choices and limited by the time i.e. they all have just 24 hours a day, courting them is a mammoth task. This becomes even more clearer when we look at what Reed Hastings, CEO of Netflix has to say about what the real competition of Netflix is...he is not worried about Amazon or HBO, but he says that the real competition of Netflix is SLEEP, a biological necessity.
So with the advent of digital content and rise of OTT platforms, the shelf life and accessibility of any piece of video work has been extended way beyond what it used to be. And this has also changed the revenue model such that exhibitors are willing to take up more and more contents from the creators as place and time, as a barrier to exhibition, has been disrupted. This essentially means that there is a huge market for content on OTT platforms which can be streamed by the audience whenever & wherever they want, as long as they are awake and this is what Hastings meant to say.
In nutshell, there is a big opportunity out in the market for anyone who wants to jump into this. The rise of OTT platforms have democratised the whole process to some extent and the recent COVID lockdowns have completely redefined the scope of this market. In this adda, Gulshan Singh, a 2010 (+2) Vidyapith alumnus has given a small sneak peek into the world of content creation through his own personal experience of running a creative agency.
(Written by Gulshan Singh on behalf of himself)
