Zee Café takes maths on digital to promote NUMB3RS

Mathematics is the basic idea behind the show and Zee' Cafe's digital activities were in line with the subject.

Zee Entertainment's English general entertainment channel (GEC) Zee Café, which launched its new show 'NUMB3RS' in India recently, used social media to create buzz around the show before its launch. The show, which airs from Monday to Friday at 9 pm, is about mathematician Charlie Eppes who helps his brother and FBI agent Don Eppes solve criminal cases.

As a teaser campaign, Zee Café's Facebook page carried pictorial puzzles and questions around mathematics, which users were required to answer ( The channel claims that the number of users went up to more than 3,000, with all of them interacting over one single post leading up to the telecast of the show.

On Twitter, the channel created a hashtag, #Numb3rsOnZCafe, which it claims emerged as the No. 1 trending topic in India. The hashtag also promoted a contest where users could retweet the contest and unlock further mathematical problems.

Spelling out the objective behind the campaign, Anurag Bedi, SVP and business head, niche channels, Zee Entertainment, says, "The show was made a talking point amongst youngsters. A major chunk of Zee Café's target audience is active on social media and taking the digital route gives us an advantage of sure shot targeting. There was a huge curiosity built online around the central character, Charlie Eppes, by using trivia around mathematics which further generated interest in the show."

According to the channel, all these activities are being handled by an in-house team of Zee. The channel also plans to promote all its shows on digital, especially on social media, as it believes that most of it TG is very active on these platforms.

Zee has aligned several programme launch activities with digital. In November 2012, a month before the channel aired a live telecast of the Miss Universe 2012 event, Zee Café revealed one interesting fact about some contestants on Twitter and asked its Twitter followers to identify the contestant.

On Facebook, the channel used the platform's Create Event feature as an innovative promotion tool, asking its fan base to create an event in tune with Miss Universe and the user who got the maximum 'attendees' was awarded.