Likee Is The New Avenue For Bollywood To Promote Movies

Jyothi Venkatesh

In India, global short-video making platform 'Likee' is experiencing a phenomenal growth owing to a strong local network and a large user base, especially in the small cities as well as in the rural regions. With the pivotal youth-centric approach and content, Likee has emerged as a new platform for movie production houses to promote their movies among the young movie enthusiasts. Some of the big banner movies such as Dabangg3, Panipat, Chhichhore, Housefull 4 and many others had collaborated with Likee for their promotional activities.Bollywood acts as a source of inspiration, especially for youth who naturally respond to any opportunity that allows them to associate with their favourite actors, movies, singers, and others. It is worth noting that, Likee- the short video platform enables movie makers to access the hard-to-reach audiences easily that helps them to garner better impressions and attention from the target audience. It is now easy to capture the reaction of the audience sitting in far-flung areas across the country, that too in detail.

 The most exciting aspect of Likee platform is the wide range of easy-to-use tools and features that enable users to create dynamic and entertaining videos. These tools also present a game-changing opportunity for movie production houses to plan highly interactive movie promotional activities for their upcoming movies. Some of the tools that are widely popular among users and can be easily tapped by moviemakers are:

1. Lip-syncing: Indian youth that is highly inspired by movie stars love to talk, look, sing and mimic like their favourite celebrities. Here, Likee's lip-sync feature plays an important role as it allows users to be as close to their favourite actor as possible. Moviemakers have an incredible opportunity to popularize the dialogues or song excerpts of their upcoming movies among the young movie enthusiasts. For example, Fox Star Hindi had collaborated with Likee platform to promote their new movie Chhichhore that highlights the lifestyle of today's youth. Many dialogues and song lyrics from the movie that click the best with today's young generation were integrated as background sounds for users to create innovative dub videos. Likee users created entertaining videos using the movie’s background sound that garnered millions of views. Taking the excitement to the next level, the Likee users share their dubbed Likee videos onto other social media platforms that helps the moviemakers to amplify the movie promotions.
2. AR filters to try Bollywood look and style: Millennials love to experiment with their looks, and mostly they feel inspired by the new hairstyles, unique eyewear, makeup styles, and other fashion trends that are popular among the bollywood stars. For instance, Aamir Khan's 'Ghajini look' or Salman Khan's 'Tere Naam look' became extremely popular as soon as the movie posters were released. Likee is allowing movie makers to present a unique opportunity for users to try their favourite actors' looks virtually and also create videos with that looks to entertain their followers or friends. Recently, Mission Mangal movie, Bollywood's first space film, was rendered as an important benchmark in the Indian film industry. To amplify this message, the moviemakers collaborated with Likee to create a virtual astronaut suit that video creators used to look like an astronaut while the integration of iconic dialogue from the movie in the background, added to the charm of creating a magical video.
3. Create #Challenge to spread awareness: As a trend, cause-based movies have become mainstream and very popular among Millennials. Moviemakers are utilizing this phase to highlight as many issues as possible to create awareness and encourage people, mostly youth, to alter their ways to bring a positive change in society. Considering the large user base of the young audience from the metro as well as smaller cities, Likee is the most viable platform for moviemakers to connect and inspire the youth. For instance, a movie with a focus on the importance of cleanliness can run #SwachchBharatChallenge in which users can upload a transition video of before and after cleaning a small area around their homes.

Similarly, there are many tools and techniques on Likee platform that allow moviemakers to engage uniquely with the young movie enthusiasts and allow them access to Bollywood resources which they can integrate into their videos. The platform has also recently introduced an exciting new app function, FaceFace which utilizes Likee’s mature AI technology. The popularity of short video-making platforms is also gaining momentum among brands as it is with movie production houses as these platforms give marketers a high impact medium to reach users in the metro as well as small cities. As per a recent report by Forrester, the short video Ad spending in the Asia Pacific will grow at CAGR of 25.5% to touch $6.5 billion in 2020 from $2.1 billion. Soon, these numbers are expected to experience explosive growth. Hence, the new age short-video making platforms are emerging as one of the most effective medium in today's era to connect with youth and promote movies.

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Tags: Bollywood, Bollywood News, Bollywood Updates, Television, Telly News,  Likee, Bollywood