From Zakir Khan’s brand of biryani to Anu Menon as the face of HDFC Bank’s ‘Vigil Aunty’ campaign, 2022 saw OML’s talents are branch out to content creation, vlogging, and much more
India-wide release, December 16th, 2022: 2022, was significantly eventful, especially for OML Entertainment. The year – while witnessing OML have front-row seats to supercharge the thriving creator and creative economies in India and around the world – also saw its stand-up comedy talents further push the envelope towards diverse creative avenues, all while placing comedy at the core. And this has allowed the media and entertainment company to continue maintaining its position as a pop-cultural mainstay in India.
The last two years have seen a rapid rise in the digital content and media landscape. And this has paved the way for OML’s comedians to take this digital entertainment realm by storm by diversifying their craft to content creation, vlogging, streaming, writing, acting and business ventures and representing comedy across all their endeavours.
2022, in particular, saw OML talents like Zakir Khan become the first Indian comedian to perform and sell out the Beacon Theatre at Madison Square Garden in New York while selling 68K tickets across 46 shows in 9 countries. Additionally, two seasons of his show, ‘Farzi Mushaira’ were released on Amazon MiniTV, while his third stand-up special, ‘Tathastu’ was released on Amazon Prime Video. Furthermore, he also launched his own brand of biryani – Mehfil Biryani. Meanwhile Aishwarya Mohanraj made a smooth yet remarkable shift from a comic to emerging as a leading creator with 10x followers across platforms, now creating visual content in association with several notable brands on long-term projects.
Likewise, Tanmay Bhat created content for Netflix with ‘Tanmay Reacts’ which is now in its 4th Season. He was part of the finale episode of Koffee With Karan S7 this year too. Sumukhi Suresh, on the other hand, worked with a leading OTT platform, integrating comedy for leading actors along with launching her own content company, Motormouth Writers Pvt Ltd.. Kumar Varun too in association with OML launched a company Kumar Varun Quizzing Pvt Ltd under which all Quizzing projects & its IPs will be consolidated.
Furthermore, Anu Menon was the face of HDFC Bank’s ‘Vigil Aunty’ campaign for creating awareness about safe banking practices through a series of videos, reels, and chat shows, while OML paved the way for Rahul Dua to be the host for Shark Tank India S2.
On the stand-up comedy front, Anirban Dasgupta featured in the highly prestigious show Just For Laughs New International Faces and was on a month-long tour with the finest comedians at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival across Australia. Similarly, Kanan Gill and Rahul Subramanian toured the UK and the USA. Further, Samay Raina’s India tour sold over 15K tickets and Biswa Kalyan Rath’s USA 6-cities tour sold over 8K tickets. He toured internationally in London, Dublin and Kenya too.
Rishabh Nahar – Senior Vice President – OML, said, “This year was most certainly hugely successful for us and our talents. Over the years, OML has experienced prolific growth to evolve as a custodian of all things pop culture in the country. However, we are still and will always be an artist-first agency, focusing on enabling our talents to build a connecting bridge between their art and its economy. And we do this by always striving to stay ahead of the curve and keeping an ear out to recognise unique potentials in the pop-culture conversations to help navigate an artist’s future career direction.” He added, “We are excitedly looking forward to 2023, where we continue to identify and strive to build newer & sustainable avenues of monetisation for the creator ecosystem. Diversification & thinking bigger has become increasingly more important & one of our focus is going to be able to provide those solutions across the board, to both the artists & the brands we work with.”
Successfully identifying comedians as the next big thing in the entertainment world, OML diversified its roster with comedians in 2014. Since then, the company has endeavoured to build on its decades of insights to create opportunities for its comedian ecosystem. And the immense growth of its comedy artists this year is a testament to this.
