Welikeit, Sandalwood’s social-media stars walk the red carpet this time

This year this movie industry tapped into social-media buzz, and the best efforts were rewarded by city-based Ideeria.
Welikeit, Sandalwood’s social-media stars walk the red carpet this time

Sandalwood, as critics claim, has always been a back-bencher – smart, yet takes its own sweet time to come up with the best. In 2017, Sandalwood stepped out of traditional promotional strategies and took to social media. This led to making of the best films and webseries in the industry. Kannada films were discussed across India and remake rights of many films sold like hot cakes.

Hence, to find the best of Kannada Entertainment Industry on the social media in 2017, a first-of- its-kind survey #Welikeit was done by Ideeria team. Ideeria, a Digital Media Brand from Poster Boy Art Studios Company founded by Puneeth B A, has found that 2017 saw drastic changes in social-media trends with Dubsmash, viral videos, trolls and memes creating platform for Sandalwood to generate exclusive content.
A 30-member jury chose the social media trendsetters in 2017.

While Yash takes the cake as the person of the year in the survey, Rakshit Shetty was chosen as smart producer, Suni the best director and Sruthi Hariharan the smart actress. Much-awaited satirical comedy Humble Politician Nagraj has maintained kept social-media interested in it, and the lead actor of the film Danish Sait has been chosen as smart actor.

Speaking to City Express, Puneeth says, “Every year, we see a variety of bests of industry ranked on performance, box-office collection or number of movies. But this year, we saw an upsurge of content creators who made content exclusively for digital platform that was tried only in small scale before. Hence I decided to come up with the social media list.”

‘We were the last to join in’

“We are the last people to adopt social media platform to promote and brand films. Though it already existed in other industries from years, this was tried-tested and succeeded for the first time in Kannada only this year. Kirik Party team, during promotions, released a few meme-friendly posters. They knew that the troll pages will pick it up and make memes out of it and this boosts the visibility of the film,” he says. Other films that worked social media to their advantage include Shuddhi, Urvi, Dayavittu Gaminisi and Chamak.

“Dubsmash, live video and quirky virals by film team members added to this trend,” he adds.
The year 2017 also saw almost two-fold increase in webseries and satirie, such as Loose Connection and Weekend with Ramesh, because filmmakers were aware of the dominance of social media. “There are hundreds of troll pages and every page has over 1 to 2 lakh followers. And most of them follow a template. So, if one page picks a topic, other 100 pages blindly follow…entertainment industry made best use of this,” he adds.

The jury
The 30-member panel had people from different age groups, including students, lecturers and IT professionals. Apart from Bengaluru and Mysuru, it has a member each from Mangalore, Kumta, Manipal. The panel comprises people active on social media, who are part of regular discussions in Kannada creative space on the digital platforms and also common content receivers.

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The New Indian Express
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