Simba Uproar: Roar from Home

Simba Uproar is a music property owned by Simba Craft Beer which was created to host unique musical experiences from across the world. This project was one that I had helped build from the ground-up, right from its concept, naming, and visual identity to artist management, event curation and space design. Here is a link to this project.

At the start of 2020, Simba Uproar had successfully executed a world-class collaboration with Cercle Music, the first of its kind event in India at Jai Vilas Palace. Come the Covid-19 pandemic, all physical events came to a stand-still March onwards. Simba Uproar was reeling from a successful year before. Ishwaraj Bhatia (co-founder Simba Craft Beer) came to me with a sincere request - to somehow carry forward the momentum.  

It was a sensitive time for the world. I had to be empathetic of the situation around me yet adapt to make things work for the music property. Numerous brainstorming sessions later, with the help of my design team, I arrived at a good set of ideas and finalised these with the Simba marketing team. I created a sub-category of events under Simba Uproar called ‘Roar from Home’, which portrayed the idea of enjoying music at the comfort of your home. Under ‘Roar from Home’, a number of activities would be carried out through the course of the year in unison with the sentiments of people at the time. Following were a set of activities that were planned, reorganising on the way due to the unpredictable situation we all were in:

Industry

Music, Festival, Food and Beverages

Scope

Digital Marketing, New Concepts, Video Production

Team

Indranil Udupi, Vidit Agarwal, Abhisek Sarda

March 2020 - April 2020

Spotify Playlists: I created a Simba Uproar profile on Spotify where I curated playlists for weekends. This felt like a good activity to keep our audience's connection to music on a roll. It also was a subtle way to bring out the Simba Uproar brand equity in a subtle yet effective manner.

April 2020 - July 2020

Under ‘Roar from Home’, we partnered with underground disc-jockeys (djs) across the country and had them perform live from their respective homes. This did two things for the Simba Uproar brand:

  1. Support local independent artists and give them a platform to perform during a difficult economic situation.

  2. It helped strengthen our stance as leaders in the music entertainment space in India.

As additional support to the brand, I also leveraged some contacts in my network, and secured 3 free performances on our channels.

August 2020 - October 2020

While we were trying our best to keep up the momentum, we were not getting the traction we wanted. Number of viewers on the online gigs were increasing but not to the levels we wanted; the effort and money we were spending did not get the returns it deserved. Other entertainment properties were following suit and hosting online gigs themselves. So our shared audience had begun giving a deaf ear to such online events. We had to take a step back.

So, in consultation with the Simba management team, we decided to pause, take a breath, and stay off the music scene for a couple of months. Maybe people would come asking for us to resume, maybe not. But we had to pause our efforts.

November 2020

By mid-October, we were receiving messages from our followers on Instagram/FB asking for the next Uproar event. The brief hiatus had worked in some way. We got on our feet and decided to host a live performance at an exotic location in the first week of November. We also made a slight change to the digital channel, we carried it out on Youtube, instead of Instagram & FB. This time, the number of viewers were at an optimum level - above our expectations. So the consensus was to carry out events with sufficient breaks rather than back-to-back set of events. Find below the full event on Youtube:

Learnings

We had a plan, we put in all our effort, but in the end we might not have what we wanted. What mattered was, to keep trying and not give up. As a culmination of our efforts, I can strongly claim that online events are no match to a proper physical gig.

As we eagerly hope for the pandemic to get under control and the situation to get better, we will keep doing small activities within our capacity to keep the Simba Uproar name fresh in the minds of people. Eventually, we will move to conducting socially distanced physical events.