GroupM's Motion to invest Rs 300 crore in content production: Ashwin Padmanabhan

GroupM’s content investment and rights management company – Motion Content Group – is set to invest Rs 300 crore into content production as it ventures into the movie business.

During the launch of the company's latest show, ‘Jai Ho! Bharat Ki Anant Yatra’, Ashwin Padmanabhan, President - Investments, Trading, and Partnerships, GroupM - India, revealed that this was the first time Motion would be doing films, and that they would be producing 10 feature films this year - seven in Marathi, one Tamil, and one Hindi bilingual film.

Padmanabhan also shared that Motion has big plans for 2023. He announced the launch of Coke Studio Tamil with the Coca-Cola team in Chennai – the first-ever Coke Studio show in any Indian regional language. “2023 is going to be a point of inflection for Motion. Not only will we do what we always do well - producing web shows and TV shows - but with the launch of movies we will see a new chapter in Motion. And the way GroupM goes about creating content and starts partnering with whole ecosystem of platforms and TV channels, it is now looking into theatres as well.”

Motion Content Group India’s IP includes the YAARI Series, Critics Choice Awards and Hello Sago.

Speaking about the overall content investment, he shared, “Motion Content today is a Rs 300-crore business and we will invest the same amount of money in producing either our own IPs or even content that is not our IP, but we fund a platform.”

In partnership with Google and Meta, Motion Content announced the launch of ‘Jai Ho! Bharat Ki Anant Yatra’ in collaboration with Optimum Television. The show, a tribute to the contribution that the Indian civilization has made to the world, takes viewers on a journey through India's past, present and future. The show will comprise of three episodes for a duration of one hour each. It will be aired on Zee TV SD, Zee TV HD, Zee Cinema HD, & TV, Zee news and Hindustan.

GroupM launched Motion Content Group (Motion) in 2017 to meet the ever-growing market demand for new economic models for premium content across the entertainment and media marketplace. The company has been producing web shows and TV shows but this will the first time that the group will be producing films.

“The way we see our engagement in the content ecosystem is more than that of enabling. As GroupM, we in a way are custodians of a lot of advertising that our brands, our customers do. That's our core but we also understand that if we want to be able to deliver the best for our clients, we also need to create a strong ecosystem on the platform side as well,” Padmanabhan added.

He further said, “With the kind of volatility that we see in the markets today, for platforms too it has become very difficult to predict what content to invest in. And that's where we actually launched Motion Content Group and said Motion can start working with platforms, first to enable them to produce more and better-quality content, because if they produce more content with better quality, it will engage better with consumers. If they engage better with consumers, our brands, and our clients will be benefited.”

Talking about the rationale behind getting into films, he said, “The interest in movies started because we realized that the movie industry is going through some sort of a mini crisis. At one level, you have producers who are putting a lot of money and on the other hand there are people who tend to avoid investing. But movie as a format is one of the most powerful ways of telling stories and when you move from theatre to OTT to a television platform a story gets viewers, and is consumed by millions again, and again. And hence, we felt that this is a format that we should embrace because it forms a core part of the content that today goes on OTT and television.”

He also further clarified that none of these works or shows is branded content. “In the show ‘Jai Ho’ you will hardly see Meta or Google Cloud. There will be interaction with someone from Google, who's going to talk about the future. In that context, there will be a Google Cloud session but there’s no brand plug in.”