Democratizing Entertainment: Designing Content for Mobile-First Experiences

I remember my first time watching Kaun Banega Crorepati (KBC) way back in 2000. I was still in school, a quizzer, debater — full-fledged geek, basically — and here was a form of entertainment that validated my geekiness. Not only that, suddenly my relatives did not think that I was wasting time attending school fests and winning quizzes! This pastime activity of mine had legitimacy because it was on national TV for everyone to watch and love. Unlike Bournvita Quiz Contest, KBC was not only a quiz show catering to geeks, school kids and the like, but also mass-market entertainment, something that entire families avidly consumed as they sat down for their dinner together.

Fast-forward to early 2018 — I had been working with Pocket Aces as a Managing Editor for FilterCopy for a few months, one of the biggest brands on the Indian internet. On 9th January 2018, for the very first time, I used Loco, our newest initiative, and I fell in love. Here was this little app, which only had a couple of thousand users at the time, and it gave me that same magical feeling that KBC had evoked. Except, it was better — I was the person who got to answer questions and win. No maniacal auditioning, no casting director deciding whether I could be on national TV or not. Just an incredibly entertaining, interactive live game I could play on my phone. And there was nothing between me and the prize except my ability to get answers right. It was a unique experience.

I started playing regularly and I found myself more and more immersed because I discovered something even more interesting. The thrill lay in not just winning but winning against other people. My friends. My family. Strangers on the internet. It was a battle royale of sorts, and it was fun as hell.

What was exhilarating was that it wasn’t just me who was feeling this way. As I took a step back from being an immersed user and thought objectively as a content creator, I realized that it was people from all over the country who felt this exhilaration and engagement. Loco’s mentions were blowing up our Twitter handle: people were tweeting, and tweeting passionately.

This community feeling was something I hadn’t seen before. Some people were angry about losing, others were happy about winning. Some were saying thanks to “Hippo ji”, some were cursing their luck, some were cursing their networks. But we were united, we were #Loconation. There was a unique culture forming outside of the platform, which was fascinating to watch and be a part of.

A few months later, I found myself heading Loco’s content — and boy has the user to creator journey been a rollercoaster one. One that nothing had prepared me for, nothing could have.

As a traditional book publisher turned digital content publisher, I’d had a steep learning curve in the past few years of my career. I had learnt to embrace the instantaneity of feedback when it came to digital content — success or failure of my content wasn’t speculative, based on months-old data from third parties and sales figures. I had been thriving on instant data as the metric for success, but here — with both data and a vocal community thrown into the mix — this was feedback on steroids. From highly time-consuming content creation models of traditional media and entertainment, I had journeyed into a space where I had to deliver fast and I had to deliver effectively. The KBC / television model of creating content was not going to work.

The per-episode-cost of a TV show is immense: with its high fixed costs, its “perfectionist” model of creation, the long cycle of production and post-production, subjective discussions to determine what audiences like and want. We, on the other hand, had hours to deliver. I may have rediscovered my love for quizzing and the glamour of being “mastermind”, but our users were demanding an experience that was 10x better than KBC.

This, I should point out, was not a drawback. It was an opportunity. An opportunity that only comes along once in a lifetime.

While we did not have the unlimited resources and budgets of a TV channel, we were also blessed with the gift of being new. This meant we did not have the constraints of working within the “HiPPO” model of content creation — where the opinion of the highest paid person in the room matters more than anything else. We had data, we were working with a product that had actual virality to back up its potential for future success, and we had a blank canvas on which we could work. We could iterate quickly and win!

Within a month of Loco’s launch, other apps appeared, following the same pattern, cannibalizing user interest and attention. The pressure to stay ahead and provide a better experience was immense. If we didn’t, users would be disappointed by the shows and their gameplay experience. Worse, they would be bored of the platform itself. We had to find new ways to come up with better, more entertaining content. And because we worked hard, paid attention to our data, to our users, we have been able to create multiple successful content formats.

The best research, we decided, was to launch and learn. The most effective way to find out the true results of our experiments was by serving them up to our users and letting those users decide whether they liked it or not. We launched; spent hours staring at our retention curves to determine whether users genuinely engaged with that new form of content or not; and made decisions based on this data.

No “pilots”, no “premieres for critics”, no false or paid validation. Do our new content formats make users come back to the platform to consume more of it, or do they not? That has been the lynchpin for our decision-making in terms of content strategy. And that’s what has kept us going.

As Vidya Balan famously said in The Dirty Picture: “Filmein sirf teen cheezon ke wajah se chalti hai — entertainment, entertainment and entertainment”.

Let’s paraphrase, shall we? Any form of content in the day and age when you’re battling for audience attention (and phone memory and screen space) succeeds because of three things: engagement, engagement and engagement.

So how does one engage?

The thing to remember here is actually simple: people engage with things that resonate with them. Things that are part of everyday experiences, perhaps, but presented differently, with a unique spin that make them stand out. One does not have to always reinvent the wheel — one simply has to adapt it to suit one’s purposes.

Take, for example, our show Loco Bazaar.

We arrived at the idea for Loco Bazaar while trying to answer the question “What is one thing that everyone in the world does?” They breathe, of course. But we weren’t about to make a “hold your breath” game show. The next on our list was shopping. Everyone shops. And everyone has an idea about the value of things, the price they’re willing to pay to acquire something.

Loco Bazaar has 2 hosts showing users an item and discussing it, and then asking questions related to the price of the item. While some products are basic consumption items (soda, chips, batteries, etc.), some aren’t (perfume, medium to high-end wristwatches, etc.) — a blend of everyday living and aspirational window-shopping, that eventually lets users win money. Our tagline for the show is: “The only bazaar where you don’t spend money, you earn money”.

This wasn’t an altogether new concept: TV has done this successfully with The Price Is Right. But where we were coming from was to make this fun and interesting for Indian users — to be viewed, played and enjoyed on a vertical screen, on their phones. And bringing this to the phone screen also sets users up for social commerce in the future.

A few weeks after Loco Bazaar, we launched our show Loco Googly.

Loco Googly is a format in which we give users an answer and they need to select the right question for which the answer fits. The idea behind this was to make the known unknown — and the unknown known — by giving our tentpole show, Loco Quiz, a different spin altogether. This is “Loco gone ulta” by literally turning the well-established trivia game format upside down.

Another show that has proven super successful for us is Loco Story.

The idea here was to engage users through the entirety of a single show — keep them watching even if they were eliminated. So we harked back to those childhood memories of listening to stories from our favourite grandpas and grandmas — and came up with a game where a story is being told through interconnected questions.

This is a game that does not require a user to be a huge trivia buff, anyone can play and win it — but it is a game users can only win if they’re paying attention.

As of December 2018, we have 10 different shows on Loco.

Some of these are shows with live hosts, filled with banter. Some of these are super-fast hostless games that allow users a quick fix without taking up too much time.

Not every format is as successful as others — but this success is something we measure strictly using data. Reaction to a first show is not enough, neither is social media feedback.

We study our data over time, look at our retention curves for formats over days, weeks and months.

If something is at the bottom of our retention graph, it is not enough to decide that we shouldn’t do that any longer. We look at in-game retention too — there are shows where users stay right through to the end, watching and engaging even after they have been eliminated.

We analyse why a format is successful or not successful. We learn, we iterate, and we come up with something better and stronger.

Track, analyse, ideate, launch. Repeat.

That’s our content mantra. What’s yours?

Want to join LocoNation? Download the app and become a part of this ever-growing community today!