With almost 300 hundred hours of content being uploaded on YouTube every minute (not even counting Facebook or platforms like Netflix and Amazon Prime), you could devote your life to catching up on every mini-clip, every gag, and every season of every show on the internet but you’d fail spectacularly. Content may be the king, but today he’s terribly common.

Standing out in this mayhem then is like trying to pull a headstand in a Mumbai local — awkward and pointless. You can’t even trot out the “quality over quantity” line because the consumer — you, me and your deadbeat neighbour — will probably tell you to go back to the 80’s and come back with a better one. But it remains that there’s a forest of content out there and you need to make sure when your tree drops, someone is around to hear it.

Voice is what you should be able to distinctly hear above all the noise. Voice can be defined as a point of view on the world, a personality. Voice is as real as it is ephemeral.

Globally, a few digital media brands such as Vice and a few movie franchises notably from Marvel, as well as, a few show franchises have managed to create multiple pieces of content that resonate with the same tone. They’ve broken the conventional mould of looking at the world with one homogenous view, and have met with immense success. They are a testament to the wisdom of inverting the pyramid. It’s impossible to please all people all the time, but it is a good business model if you can manage to please a few every time.

Voice is what you should be able to distinctly hear above all the noise. Voice can be defined as a point of view on the world, a personality. Voice is as real as it is ephemeral. At Arré, everything that we do, across every format, is tied together by voice. The voice must be original, interesting and above all, experimentative. At Arré, the nonfiction voice is the rigor of journalistic ethic with the style of Jim Carrey while fiction is laced with an edge.

If the voice is clear and differentiated, it can be moulded into any format, genre, or story or can stand out in any environment that it is distributed in. Arré’s content is therefore format and platform agnostic. Arré is available across a host of distribution platforms — from arre.co.in to the IOS and Android Apps to Facebook, YouTube, Jio Cinema, Yupp TV, SonyLIV, Vodafone Play, Ola Prime Play and a range of others.

The stories in the universe are all the same, the ways that we tell them are different. The India v/s Pakistan narrative will always be the India v/s Pakistan narrative but the formats for telling the story are many. You can spin it into a farcical sketch, you can turn it into a national meme war, intellectualize it in an essay, provoke it with a doodle or commemorate it with a webseries. In this digital wonderland, the multiformat product that we’re offering is nothing but a highway to a more interesting place.

The stories in the universe are all the same, the ways that we tell them are different. The India v/s Pakistan narrative will always be the India v/s Pakistan narrative but the formats for telling the story are many.

For the meme millennial today, the lines between news and entertainment are blurred which is where multi-format offerings like Arré have an edge. Multi format, multi-genre is only a natural progression in the media space. No one looked at the first cow and thought of making ice-cream. Today we’re at the point where we’re ready to take that leap. Take our fiction series for instance: At a time when we are bombarded with reports of how robots are learning how to play the most complex game in the world — and winning, our marquee show “A.I.SHA My Virtual Girlfriend” gives layers and nuance to an artificially intelligent simulated humanoid.

At a time when equality of genders is a pressing issue, “Arré Ho Ja Re-gender”  provides a fresh take on gender roles. At a time when Tier 2 India is slowly making its journey to Tier 1, the stories of migrants form the basis of shows like “Official Chukyagiri”, and when internet addiction threatens to kill us all, we come to you with The Real High. “I Don’t Watch TV” offers a satirical look at the TV industry at a time when web-series are on the rise. At all given points in time, our road to entertainment is a road paved with context. If content is now becoming too common, context is stepping in as king.

At all given points in time, our road to entertainment is a road paved with context. If content is now becoming too common, context is stepping in as king.

Context to us, is an ongoing conversation, not news flashes or Twitter trends. We don’t chase headlines in our stories or fads in our fiction. We view context in the larger sense. Context is anything that keeps us on our phones, that keeps us involved, riled up, pissed off or just engaged. Context is what preoccupies us as a generation — it is film censorship at one end, our love lives on the other and everything in between. Our job is to come to work, identify context and create multi-format content in a voice that is original. As long as we do that well, the rest will fall into place.

Context is what preoccupies us as a generation — it is film censorship at one end, our love lives on the other and everything in between. Our job is to come to work, identify context and create multi-format content in a voice that is original.

Monetisation, of course, is a big part of this “rest”. Sponsors are beginning to understand how to leverage content to their advantage. The pop window and the banner ad died with disco, and the 30-second force fed commercial will soon join them. Arré doesn’t believe in advertising as an interruption. We believe in swapping stories, weaving the brand intelligently into the narrative instead of thrusting it as a full-page ad in your face when what you’re really trying to do is read. If brands wish to advertise through banner ads and 30-second video ads, they should also be seen in a content environment that is consistent in voice and tone to better connect with the target audience. The medium is after all message.

The consumer, a wise man once said, is not an idiot. She’s your wife. Only now she’s your wife with a shorter attention span and an ability to smell bullshit from a mile away. If you’re not being true to the sponsor’s brand, or your own content, she’s smart enough to sense the hypocrisy. The internet, more than any other medium, gives bonus points for honesty.

The consumer, a wise man once said, is not an idiot. She’s your wife. Only now she’s your wife with a shorter attention span and an ability to smell bullshit from a mile away. If you’re not being true to the sponsor’s brand, or your own content, she’s smart enough to sense the hypocrisy. The internet, more than any other medium, gives bonus points for honesty.

As the discipline of voice and terms of engagement with brands continue to be the focus area, the next big step is building communities within the following we have already created. People have always coalesced around their areas of interest and that’s one of the few things that even the internet hasn’t been able to change. Arré has already launched two verticals — Grub and Outdoors — that are dedicated to food and travel & adventure respectively. Both verticals launched with marquee shows “This Week in Food” and “The Real High”, respectively, and both carry content across in our native formats.

From here we will branch out further into other topics of interest, and connect them all with our distinctive voice, integrating with more brands along the way. The way forward will also have us building loyal regional communities via content in different languages — Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Bengali and Marathi. The Arré voice may one day be multi-lingual, cross-cultural and transnational but it will still be the Arré voice.

You will know it when you hear it… you, me and your deadbeat neighbour.