We believe in quality of engagement, says Gunjan Arya of OML

Holding consumers’ attention and sparking an interaction are important steps in a brand’s journey towards achieving a marketing goal. And standard metrics offered by social platforms easily tell you the amount of engagement generated by your piece of content.

However, not all actions prove to be real engagement. Likes and video views to a certain threshold are often termed as an ambiguous form of engagements. While a few marketers use such metrics as an easy way out, many ask for real engagement that has some meaning for your brand objective.

As far as content creators and platforms are concerned, they show every possible metric, including likes and shares, to prove the content worked well. On the other hand, digital content producer OML (Only Much Louder) considers 'comments' along with likes and shares in their proprietary measurement tool. The tool considers factors like human development index and cost of media for each country it operates in to report real engagement and efficiency score to their clients.

OML produces content for digital platforms, including OTTs, in the music and comedy genres.

Gunjan Arya

“Something that OML has always championed is looking at qualitative engagement numbers as opposed to views because views are easy to buy. We look at the quality of engagement because we are very clear that somebody who watches a video is not as engaged as somebody who has watched the video and commented on it. So, when we report analytics around the engagement, we make sure we actually report something called an ‘engagement score’ that we have built in-house,” Gunjan Arya, CEO, OML, said in an interaction with BuzzInContent.com.

Started as an artist management company about 19 years ago, OML has come a long way when it comes to events, shows and entertaining content. Having branched out in different verticals, the company produces live events and digital content around music and comedy, while providing brands with solutions.

Talking about its journey, Arya said, “Everything that we've done has been on the back of how to support artists better. We started out managing independent musicians while providing them with the opportunity to perform to bigger audiences and at bigger stages. And thus, we started with tapping live events. From there, we got into content because most people discover either music or comedy by watching such content on various platforms. Then, we turned to brands because today brands see an artist as a very important culture marketing vehicle and we started a brand solutions team.”

The company has produced event properties such as NH7 Weekender, Electric Daisy Carnival (EDC), etc., in partnership with various brands, including Bacardi, Budweiser and Red Bull. The company has also started working with brands outside India. It currently works with 10 plus brands in 20 plus countries and produces live event content.

OML over the years has also positioned itself successfully to help brands and artists collaborate through their branded solutions division. Its major initiatives include Social Media Stars with Dewar’s Scotch, Standing by with Red Bull, Breezer Vivid Shuffle and content for Zomato Originals.

The company’s content managers work with artists to produce content for them. It also services OTT platforms.

Having produced a lot of music content videos in the past, OML has built comedy properties through live events and on OTT platforms such as Amazon Prime Video, Netflix and Hotstar. Apart from Stand-Up Comedy Specials, Comicstaan and its recent release Afsos, a multi-episodic long-format fiction show — it has created several long-form, scripted and unscripted shows for OTT and television, many comedy specials and hundreds of short-form videos.

“Servicing OTT platforms is a three-year-old phenomenon for us but it's a sizeable business. I think the way OTT has scaled and taken to comedy, we've literally been in the best place at the best time,” she said.

Talking about comedy as a genre, Arya said content around comedy makes most conversations receptive.

“Through the lenses of comedy, a lot many topics can be discussed. It opens doors to more conversations in comfort. And when it comes to breaking the clutter, we believe it's important for artists to curate their own voice in this space,” she said.

Arya, talking about why brands see such events such as music or comedy festivals, as the biggest opportunities, said, “Most of the people can relate to such content via artists who have massive distribution online and fan following. Their content discusses all kinds of topics, which brands actually like.”

OML is also coming up with a comedy festival, “The Circuit”, between March 6 and 15 in Mumbai, Delhi and Bangalore.

The festival will have multiple comedy formats that include The Big Comedy Debate, Musical Comedy, Roast Battle, Stand-up Game, Comedy Tag Game and Regional Comedy (Gujarati, Bengali, Marathi and Malayalam) along with performances by the LGBT community and differently-abled comedians.

Talking about this new venture, Arya said, “We realised this is the right time to build a comedy festival. We see so many people try out new material around this content online; new comedians are getting discovered in regional languages."