MUMBAI: India’s first ever Acapella Music with a Cocktail Twist is here!

Pocket Aces’ lifestyle channel, Gobble created India’s first acapella cocktail anthem, in association with Bacardi NH7 Weekender. Independent artist Ambika Nayak and Acapella group Instrumen, joined hands to make music and cocktails together, creating an entertaining, and engaging showcase of talent for the weekend.

“Dil Hai Befikar” is an ode to all you Music-lovers and foodies

During an exclusive interview with Sonalika Mehra, Channel Manager, Gobble, she shared the inspiration and motivation to create such concept, getting different artist on board for collaboration, vision to promote independent artists and their future projects.

Check the interview below:

Where did you get the inspiration and motivation to create an acapella cocktail anthem?

Our usual process is to go through the brand’s requirements and pitch concept videos that fit the bill. These are generally ideas like cook-offs, recipe videos, or travel guides, home decor guides, etc.

For this given brief, the brand wanted something that had never been done before for their upcoming music festival. They wanted the video to be primarily about music while also enhancing a cocktail-making experience and promoting sales for the event. We had quickly understood that music was going to be a key enabler for this video along with the visuals of the cocktails. Having been in the digital content space for a while now, we also have a fair understanding of what audiences want. Our audiences are young, ambitious, and often experiment with new kinds of content. Thanks to new-age content creators, we’ve recently seen a lot of young and independent music artists come up with very innovative styles and formats, and the millennials and GenZ love it. For instance, ASMR (Autonomous sensory meridian response) videos are quite popular as they rely on unusual sounds to create music.

This is where our inspiration came from - creating an anthem that sticks with the audience. Audiences love a good music video and having the intrigue of acapella adds to it given that it uses no musical instruments. And when it comes to recipes, there is nothing like a good ASMR video. We decided to marry the two by creating an original music video that captures all these elements. And when we saw the final outcome, we knew we had created India’s first acapella cocktail anthem.

Watch here:

How did you get different artists on board to collaborate?

Honestly, this was the difficult part - to pass on the vision to music artists who had never worked on something like this before. They knew acapella, yes. They knew ASMR, yes. They had also seen recipe videos. But no one has ever seen all three of these elements come together to create an original track. So, it was tricky.

The idea was to work with an acapella band who can create an original track with original lyrics, which is when we found Instrumen - a band of six men, and no instruments. We worked closely with them to create the acapella track. We briefed them on the concept, the vision for the video, and the tonality that we were looking at. And from there on, they just surprised us!

The other artist that we collaborated with was singer Ambika Nayak aka Kayan A from Nothing Anonymous. She was on the Bacardi NH7 Weekender line-up. For her, the challenge was different as she has done several music videos, but had never made cocktails in front of the camera before. So it was a new experience for her as well. But that’s what we like about young talent - they are ready to experiment and innovate. We had a ball shooting this!

Share with us the vision you have to promote independent artists.

As a platform, Gobble has always promoted independent creators to deliver engaging content that is fun, quirky, and relatable to our audience. Be it through our recipe videos where we’ve given a platform to home chefs, or our DIY videos where we promote works of young, independent artists or working with fresh talent for our content - we are always looking for ways to promote them.

This is the time when the success of one small video can put you up there as an artist. Audiences are more welcoming than ever to new talent on digital mediums, be it on OTT, social media, or YouTube. New creators are redefining the content space everywhere and Gobble’s vision is aligned to giving them the right platform with the right audience that is engaged, loyal and always wanting more.

What are the upcoming projects by Gobble?

Just last year, Gobble evolved into a lifestyle platform from what was originally a Food-first platform. This means that we are now also creating content in the Travel and Home segments, along with food. We are in fact, currently working on our first series in the Home Segment. Apart from this, we are also working on new seasons of our loved properties. Projects like these are an indication that as a channel we are on the right path, and that sky's the limit when it comes to our creative avenues to work with our partner brands.