A boisterous drama about three friends dealing with the pressures of engineering school, and one friend teaching them how to dream, was a story they knew would stick. They guessed multiplexes in cities would overflow.
They figured they had a fair chance at beating Ghajini, an Aamir Khan starrer and the biggest grossing Hindi film of all time.
But something bothered them. In smaller towns, regional cinema was still king and Hindi cinema just a joker. In Gujarat, a star like Vikram Thakur at his peak, could bring in close to Rs. 7 crore. A top grossing Hindi film on the other hand could hope to rake in just Rs. 3 crore.
“We felt we aren’t connecting enough with our audience… There’s a business capacity of seven, but we are only doing three.
So there’s a lot of business we aren’t reaching out to,” says Khan as he talks to us from his Pali Hill apartment in Bandra, a Mumbai suburb. He’s wincing from a leg injury sustained earlier during the day, but is intent we hear what he’s saying.
“Do they want to be entertained? Yes. Do they like watching films? Yes. But are they watching our films? No. They’re watching regional films.” It could only mean two things, he reasoned. One, Hindi films aren’t marketed well.
And two, film makers from Mumbai don’t understand small town India. Khan was determined to figure out both answers. But how?
The Ball Begins To Roll
When a team of 25 marketing people met in August 2009, led by Prabhat Choudhary of Spice PR, who helped market four of the top five all time hits of Hindi cinema, the team didn’t know what the central idea to market 3 Idiots could possibly be. Khan’s brief though was clear. Whatever they did, they had to get to the man in Bhopal, and the man in Varanasi.
For a while, Khan had been toying with a rather vague idea. The movie starts with Aamir Khan, who essays the role of the central protagonist, having disappeared into oblivion. The rest of the flick is about his friends looking for clues to find him.
How, Khan wondered, would people react if he disappeared in real life? Would people wonder where he was? Would the media write speculative stories on Khan’s whereabouts? But more importantly, how could the whole thing be orchestrated?
Through all of August last year, they debated on the plan. They tied up with online gaming firm Zapak. And that was where they found the answer: A-R-G, or Alternate Reality Gaming.
Participants in these games interact directly with characters in the game, work with other participants to solve challenges, analyse the story and stay connected on email, telephones, and the internet. The main narrative for this form of gaming is usually based in the real world.
By September, ARG took over 60 percent of 3 Idiots’ marketing efforts. A Facebook profile “Amir the Pucca Idiot” was created, a page that would be controlled and updated entirely by Khan. It became a talking point because it was the first time an Indian celebrity had done this.
People wondered whether it really was Aamir Khan’s page. His status updates appeared in the papers. “Aamir the Pucca Idiot” would be an instrumental part of Khan’s disappearance to remote B towns, too.
By October, the 3 Idiots team had to activate the game. Before that, teams needed to be dispatched to do a recce of all the places Khan would visit during his disappearing act. They would be dispatched to small towns in Gujarat, Punjab, Bengal, and Madhya Pradesh, among others.
It would be expensive and logistics would be a nightmare. “We’d only marketed to 6-8 metros,” Chaudhary told Khan. “But there are 80 towns with at least one multiplex we had never even marketed to.”
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