Category: Branding & Advertising

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Branding & Advertising Internet Product Strategy

Zomato, Radhika Apte, Netflix, #Radflix, and Me-too Marketing

If you have been online around the end of August, and you follow the really cool people online, you must have heard about Netflix India’s love for Radhika Apte – how she seems to be a part of every piece of Netflix India original content, be it movies they produce or shows. The public has been creating jokes and memes about the affinity, and it’s gone viral.

How Netflix India’s social media team handled the attention was just brilliant. They joined in the meme fest. Not just did they appreciate the memes that the public made about Radhika Apte & Netflix, they created their own memes, coined the term ‘Radflix’, made a mock trailer of a mock film titled ‘Omnipresent’, starring Radhika Apte, written, directed, shot, and what not, by Radhika Apte, and went full throttle on having fun with it.

In short, they pwned the internet at their own game.

But this post is not about the larger phenomenon that Radflix was. It’s about a simple series of ‘ads’ that appeared in a short period of time, which shows how most Indian brands cannot think beyond “yeh wala cool hai, hum bhi karenge“.

So, while Netflix was enjoying the attention that Radflix was bringing them online, the witty social media team at Zomato made a simple two-column text format of an ad, which simply said ‘And you thought only Radhika is versatile’. The subject of this ad was Paneer, which, as per the ad is present in so many dishes / everywhere, much like Radhika Apte is.

https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

Simple, cute, topical.

What happened next was nothing short of a masterstroke by Netflix. In 3 hours time, Netflix India just replied to that ad by editing the creative, finding the letters R-A-D-H-I-K-A in the left column, crossing off Paneer and writing instead the name of their mock movie Omnipresent.

https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

Quick, witty, playful, and funny.

The internet imploded! As I’m writing this, both these tweets have generated over 22000 interactions, almost two-thirds of which has come to Netflix’s response. And we don’t even know how many times these tweets were screenshotted and shared on Facebook, LinkedIn, Whatsapp, Telegram etc.

All well so far.

Then, the Indian thing happened. Other brands noticed the buzz. Heads of marketing & CEOs of companies said “This is so cool! I want to join in too!”

So here’s the list of brands which attempted to join the party, and my commentary on each.

Reliance Mutual Funds

https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
This is the first me-too tweet I saw that day. Reliance MF replied to both the handles, “Only if you have the wealth to binge watch and eat whenever you feel like!”, which doesn’t fit the context in any way, placed a weird reading sentence in the left part of the ad, where each word exists solely so that the word W-E-A-L-T-H could be spelled out, and the right part simply sports their own tagline.
Talk about butchering the format.

IIFL

I found IIFL’s tweet in a reply thread to the one by Reliance MF above. It’s clear that they didn’t even try beyond copying the two-column text format. Though in terms of content style, they came closest to the Zomato ad, but sadly nobody paid any notice to create a Netflix style reply.

KFC

KFC came up with a follow-up, with the exact same approach as that of Reliance MF. Left side, let’s spell out chicken over a force-fitted longish sentence, and right side, our tagline.

Union Bank of India

A PSU bank also wanted to join in the fun. They had a strange take though, spelling out U-N-I-O-N-B-A-N-K over an insipid and weird sentence on the left, and the entire logo unit and tagline on the right. The graphic work looks like it was quickly put together on Powerpoint only.

Tata Sky

My favorite DTH service provider ;), Tata Sky, didn’t want to be left far behind. So their social media team cooked something up. But brand visibility is paramount, so they just list random keywords along with the words “Tata Sky” on the left, so that they can spell out R-A-D-H-I-K-A (thank god for small mercies!), and their tagline on the right.

Cashify

Cashify, (who are they?) made an ad, where they wrote a sentence which is just copy for what they offer, force-filled with the earlier brands’ names, just so they look like they are also “in”, and a boring “Cashify now” on the right. Wait, what does the sentence spell out? No R-A-D-H-I-K-A, no C-A-S-H-I-F-Y?

Daily Objects

This hashtag laden copy came 2 days late, where they list items that they presumably discuss on the left, only to spell out their own name, and on the right they have their logo. Narcissism much? The only connection to the original story is the tags Radflix and Omnipresent, almost as if this is their half-hearted entry to a contest called Radflix.

Indigo Nation

Indigo Nation listed its sub-brands on the left, its logo on the right, and spelt out C-R-E-A-T-I-V-E, and its tweet read ‘Creativity is where it all started, and after all humaari creativity apt hai!’, again hashtag Radflix hashtag Netflix. Because how else do you show you are creative, if you don’t write creative three times in your creative?

Fullerton India

Fullerton India, created a starkly orange creative, with an insipid tweet ‘your partner in growth’, the list of things they do on the left, but interestingly enough, instead of circling letters to spell out F-U-L-L-E-R-T-O-N, they use the crossword format. They were afraid their audience would have to be spoon fed the word in one straight line. And on the right (this is my favourite!), they cross out Radhika and write Fullerton India. Guys, Radhika was supposed to be spelt out on the left! Stay with the format!

That’s What Sri Said

Some young individual professional who is presumably just starting off also wanted to use the format to get likes & retweets, and some visibility. Let’s just talk about the creative – it’s a list of issues on the left, and the words ‘Problems after college’ on the right. R-A-D-H-I-K-A is spelt out all right, but look at what words were put in so that it could be done – ‘Kam holidays’, ‘Taunts’, ‘Hormones’! The best part of this one is the tweet ‘Radhika Apte being versatile. We found her too.’ Can someone translate this for me please?

Playgard Condoms

The only thing missing from the mix was a condom brand. Playgard copied the format, replaced the left side with types of positions, and quite ‘helpfully’ wrote Positions on the right, because wouldn’t you really want to know what the things on the left are called? No spelling out words, and no crossing out words. But look what else they have written – “the only time Radhika won’t be present”. How presumptuous! Or on second thoughts, it’s just humble on the brand’s part 😉

Buzzinga Digital

An agency called Buzzinga Digital also made an ad, listing out R-A-D-H-I-K-A over a list of things they seem to offer. Nothing on the right. And the tweet content is a slight change to what Netflix had tweeted.

IFW Web Studio

Yet another agency, but this time from Udaipur. Their ad shows the same – the left column lists out a series of places in Udaipur, spelling out R-A-D-H-I-K-A over it, with the right part saying Udaipur – shooting ke liye apt hai! And the tagline to the logo, and the tweet are little more than implorations to Radhika Apte to visit Udaipur.

Hungry Head

This was the most inane one so far. The left half lists food items (with an all-small case nachos), and the right half just says Maggi. I don’t know how the left connects to the right, and what they all have to do with anything we have seen so far. And I don’t even know why the Maggi is in a smaller type than the others even though it’s alone on the right. The tweet says ‘Not only Radhika can fit everywhere. Our Maggi does too!’ Oh and did you notice the innovative hashtag #scaredgames?

What’s common across all these attempts at marketing are a) an attempt to just exploit the trend using the visual structure and the hashtags with no understanding of why the originals worked, b) tagging Radhika Apte, Zomato, and Netflix India’s handle in an attempt to gather attention and hoping for retweets from them, c) usage of the hashtags #omnipresent and #Radflix to appear in searches, and d) a cringeworthy overuse of the word apt (it’s a wordplay on Apte – do you see how clever all these brands are?) everywhere.

Having said all of this, I came across a funny take on the whole thing as well. A kind of subversion, a tongue-in-cheek ad, by a brand called JOOG. Take a look.

JOOG

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Let me know in the comments if you have found any more copies of the concept, and I’ll add them to the post.

Categories
Branding & Advertising What's wrong? WTF

Notes on CommunityMatrimony TVC, or Let’s Be Regressive On National Television (1/2)

You might have seen this ad in the last couple of years on the television, and would’ve either cringed at it, ignored it, or (horror of horrors!) admired it and used their services.

Here’s my take on it (first of a two-post long ‘rant’):

The strategy/advertising/marketing/craft angle

Idea: Give them what they want
They want to “save their honour which their children don’t care about”. Let’s give them that. Let’s reinforce their perceptions. Let’s not fight anything. Let’s approach the parents, because they are the ones who give us listings in the first place. Let’s not approach a matrimony ad from the angle of the people whose life will be affected by the marriage, because we need to strengthen our buyers‘ idea that the end-users are not capable of taking the right decision, or are anyways on the “wrong side”. And that it is the right & duty of the parents to choose the life partner of their children, and whatever choice the said children have is not important for the overall happiness of the overall family.

Approach:
Classic before & after.
Before: Daughter was seen in public with undesirable different-caste boy.
Problem.
Solution steps in: CommunityMatrimony representative.
After: Photograph of a happy daughter happily married to decent same-caste boy. Relaxed parents. Please also note that the girl was happy in both the before & after scenarios. Our product does not affect the happiness of the end-user. It’s only the regressive parents we care about, and we’ve provided them (though in a simplistic process) with much-needed (though debatable) “happiness”.

Naming disaster:
As generic as it can be. It’s not an ownable name (only an ownable domain name). It’s a descriptor rather than a name. And then there are the various variants of it – the ones you are expected to use – like loharmatrimony.com in my case. Or do I use biharimatrimony.com? Who the hell is going to tell me that, huh?
Also, notice the smart usage of the euphemistic, almost modern social-economy word “community” instead of what they meant: “caste”.

The Execution
The acting is second-rate, the dubbing is third rate, the expressions are… well, the less we talk about it the better. The scripting/storytelling is anyway nothing to write home about.

Now on to the real WTF moment:
The enemy here, is not germs, pollution, old age, bad style, inefficiency, body odor, tooth decay, dandruff, stains, cholesterol. The enemy is other human beings, another community, and of course, our own children.

This ad takes just the opposite route from ‘catch ’em young’, where advertisers tailor their messages towards children so that they get early-in-their-life adopters (who can be addicts later on), or ads where the decision maker is an adult but the message is so tailored that their kids get influenced and then coerce them into buying that brand. Here, it’s just the opposite – attract the parents, because

  1. most marriageable youngsters would not be caught dead trying to find a life partner online, and
  2. in India, the society and parents have a sort of entitlement to choose any person’s life partner on the pretext of “wanting the best for our kids”, even though their prime concern is “is the other person from our community or not?”.

This concern is what CM taps. Do they say “we’ll find you an able suitor”? Or, “we’ll find someone who’ll gel well with your daughter”? Or, “your daughter will like him at first glance”? No. All they say is, “why let your daughter stay friends with that other caste guy she likes, when we can help you find a complete stranger (whom you can call your own because of his caste) and forcing her to marry him instead?”.

Another post about the societal implications coming soon…

I’ll be waiting for your comments 🙂

Categories
Branding & Advertising What works?

Impact: Ceat Tyres ‘idiot’ ad

If you ask me to recollect an impactful tyre ad, you’ll see a confused me. As far as I can remember, I don’t remember having seen any powerful tyre ads. I might remember the Ralson ads from the 80s (for sheer frequency of appearance), the MRF man (but no ad) or a vague idea that Ceat used to have a running rhinoceros, but any powerful ad? No.

Enter the “new” Ceat. And their new advertising.

Ceat seems to be focusing its marketing efforts around the idea of grip, and the new campaign is built around that.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n41vL0gT-gM&w=480&h=385]

Short, crisp, impactful.

So what really works here?

  1. The message: Ceat tyres have better grip. Better grip means holding on to the road. Which means powerful braking. Which translates to safety.
  2. Empathy: If you drive or ride anywhere in India, you of course are fed up of that set of people called ‘everyone else on the road’. People who don’t care for traffic rules. Who cross roads in peak traffic at any spot other than a zebra crossing. Who talk on the phone while walking on the road, while riding a bike, while driving a car. Who would come in your way out of nowhere while you are trying to rush to office or rushing home from a party late at night. Ceat has called this set of people ‘idiots’. And we all agree, don’t we? These people would put everyone’s life in danger with some stupid action of theirs, then look at you indignantly as if it’s all your fault! You, the good law-abiding driver, are left flummoxed at the sudden turn of events, and just swear at him under your breath.
    Doesn’t this happen a little too often? Which is why Ceat proclaims – The Roads are filled with Idiots. And we all nod in agreement. Which is why you need to get your tyres from the tyre company which already knows this universal truth that you feel so deep inside. Classic convincing!
  3. The scripting & execution: both the TVCs that have aired so far (family coming back from the movies cut off by a speeding SUV, office executive suddenly has to brake for a man with a pram) start on a relaxed, slice of life note, with dialogue which makes you wonder what it’s an ad for, and the blow is delivered when you least expect it. The protagonists are shown to be shocked. The background music aids in the impact. And the line is delivered. Crisp, impactful, winning.

Oh, and Ceat has not stopped at just making TVCs. They also have an online campaign which is tied in to their bike tyre portal www.beidiotsafe.com. And they are doing some really innovative magazine advertising – the last of which I saw in the xBHP magazine’s 2nd issue. Go give it a look.

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Branding & Advertising Business What works?

Mohabbat Kare Khush Rahe Muskuraye: How Anchor changed toothpaste advertising!

Quick question: When I say oral care products advertising what comes to your mind? Most common answers: doctors in white lab coats, cute children in dentists’ chambers, cute children talking to their parents in metaphors about tooth decay (daanto me saDan!), people holding their cheeks because their gums/teeth hurt, and lots of information about roots of the teeth, gums, salt content, fluoride content, whitening strips and what not.

Too much information, then some more information, then scaring the audience (especially children) about the scenario in absence of the product.

How about some positiveness people? How about some classic emotional advertising? Something smart? Something snappy in thought, not just execution?

Well, here you go:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rw5arTc26-0&w=480&h=385]
Video shared on YouTube by richacsaxena

Anchor, a very new entrant in the already over-saturated, over-crowded toothpaste market, that bored us with their Kajol-asking-when-you-changing-your-toothpaste-huh-huh advertisements in the past, turns a new leaf and does the daring but smart job of breaking the clutter by going back to the basics.

Too much jargon eh? Not really.

The ad became an instant hit with many advertising professionals I know, and whenever I played it back to anyone I knew, the instant reaction when the ad ended was never short of “wow!”

So, what works here?

  1. Back to basics: advertising at the very basic is a sales pitch delivered emotionally. It has to be engaging & fun. Because if you bore your customer he will not listen to you. And it has to have a story. Because who doesn’t love a story? Apart from lukewarm “my dentist papa says XXX prevents tooth decay” ads, there have hardly been any stories in oral care ads. We have been bombarded with component messages (triclosan anyone?), fake (as in actors playing) doctors endorsing the products on TV, and lately a father talking to his kid about oral care (which is somewhat interesting, and can be a topic of another post), but none of them comes even close to what this is.
  • The story: it is a story. A complete story. A story in the truest sense. There’s a hot wife, obviously madly in love with her husband, baking something, obviously for her husband. We get to see the husband momentarily in the photo-frame which she kisses out of overflowing love. The context is set. The mood is set. And then as a consequence to an accident arising out of her happy & carefree moves, we see the disastrous obstacle she (and her husband) has to face now: the cake is hard as stone! It’s so bad that it creates a dent in the refrigerator’s door! It’s so bad that it causes the tiles on the floor to crack ! Then we see the husband, a clearly average looking guy (played by Sharib Hashmi) – a clear contrast from the hot model wife he has, and the way they hug and are happy together, you start wondering how is this even possible. He is happy to see that his darling wife has baked a cake for him, and he lunges at it. The wife, who by now is clearly aware of the obstacle, tries to stop her dear husband from trying to eat the cake and losing his teeth, but stops short when she sees the miracle! The husband effortlessly bites into the cake, and overcomes the obstacle like a true hero! “How is that even possible?”, you think, forgetting your original dilemma of the unmatched pair. It is at this moment that the product comes in, and you get to know that it is in fact a toothpaste commercial – Anchor is the ally which helps our hero defeat the evil “stone” cake.
  • Suspension of disbelief: suspension of disbelief is a potent tool to engage the audience – it keeps them thinking and wondering. Like the dinosaurs living alongside humans in The Flintstones. Like the ultra-modern weapons in medieval looking arenas in the Quake franchise. The first disbelief moment is the husband-wife pair – everyone wonders what has this guy done to get such a wife, and then everyone wonders how is she so in love with him. The audience is so engaged wondering and thinking that they are now not taking their eyes off the screen. The second disbelief moment is the obviously exaggerated strong teeth our hero has. However ludicrous it looks, it engages you, and gets the message across.
  • Story-like tension and relief: a happy scene becomes tense when you see that her ultimate symbol of love for her husband (with two sweet pink candy hearts on top!) is in reality a nemesis for human teeth, and then it’s released when you find that the hero of a husband brushes with Anchor daily in order to be able to take such minor obstacles in his stride effortlessly.
  • Benefit: Strong, healthy teeth – that also are shiny white (as seen in every frame that the man smiles in – his dark complexion helps here). What else do you need from a toothpaste? Very strongly communicated, with such a sweet emotional backdrop. You won’t forget this message for a long time!
  • Underlying message: you know what proposition Axe sells on, right (nudge, nudge, wink, wink)? Now here’s an average-looking guy, who has a hot model of a wife swooning over him, using her half-baked (forgive the pun) skills to make him a cake, and worrying over the fate of his teeth, and he turns into a hero – for her and everyone else – due to this product we have here – Anchor toothpaste. This guy is a winner, and he uses this product. Why wouldn’t you?
  • Life connect: a toothpaste is an integral part of one’s life, not just a product comprising of chemicals who is supposed to “stop tooth decay” because your dentists says so. The health of your teeth affects your life. But instead of going the “ouch my teeth hurt because I didn’t use XXX toothpaste”, we have a positive story that says “look how awesome my life is, and how I am nothing short of a hero, because I use XXX toothpaste”. And of course our hero & his wife are happy once again, thanks to our product!
  • The production values: excellent execution. But what did you expect from a certain god called Prasoon Pandey?
  • The soundtrack: I love this part. The old Noorjehan song works as the perfect backdrop for the dreamy-eyed love story we witness, and the phrase “mohabbat kare khush rahe muskuraye” works well for the category – love, be happy and smile.

While I was writing this, I was wondering who the agency was, and only one name was repeating in my mind: Ogilvy. I confirmed it, and it is Ogilvy India. Love them for bringing in a breath of fresh air in the (ironically) stale category of toothpaste advertising.

Categories
Branding & Advertising Strategy What's wrong?

Castrol Active ad: Analysis

Before & After: You must have seen this format.

[before / after]
Gyms, diet plans and hair loss repair clinics practice a crude form of such advertising. Dishwashing liquid/bars also advertise in this format. Fair & Lovely made an assembly line of such ads, though their ads are one level higher on the story bit.

It is quite a general way of selling you something.

“Without our product, your life wasn’t that great, you had such & such problems, and when our product entered your life, it changed, for the better.”

But there has to be a connect in this line.

Which is what the makers of the last two Castrol Activ TVCs seem to have forgotten.

The script of both the ads is similar: An elder is teaching a young one (son/brother) to ride a bike. The drill is simple: clutch, accelerator, brake! Why brake? Because in city traffic, you need to brake more often than accelerate. Enter the helpful mechanic, who tells him that he’s right, but braking too often leads to extra pressure on the engine, which is harmful. Which is why you need Castrol’s new Activ engine oil. Problem solved. And the after scene shows a happy father asking the son if he’d only keep braking or ride the bike after all, or the younger brother just riding off without waiting for his elder brother to get on the bike, to which an elated big brother says “Munna rider ban gaya!”.

Castrol ad: father & son
Castrol ad: father & son
Castrol ad: brothers
Castrol ad: brothers

What is the issue with this, you ask?

Well, let’s analyse.

The ad has 3 parts – problem, intervention, solution (before, product, after – familiar?). The problem was two-fold – the young rider is not happy with the pillion who is not letting him ride and is asking him to brake too often (to simulate city traffic), and the elder pillion is not happy because city traffic is a b*tch.

The intervention is an engine oil, which reduces the strain on the engine which it faces in city traffic.

The after (solution?) is a happy father, who is not asking his son to brake anymore, or a happy elder brother who is happy that his younger brother is riding well now.

Did you notice the disconnect?

The problem that the mechanic mentioned was not on the minds of our protagonists until he came in the picture. He solved a problem they were least concerned with. In fact, he does not address their problems at all – city traffic still remains a b*tch, and thus elder person should still be concerned with it. What does his intervention do? It assures you that your engine will be OK even if you braked like mad in city traffic.

And somehow, this intervention manages to make both the protagonists happy. The elder one is not at all worried about the b*tch like city traffic anymore, even though common sense says that now that he knows the bike’s engine can take the strain of repeated braking and traffic has not at all improved, he shouldn’t be worrying about the engine’s health and should be pushing the rider to keep braking more and more. But he doesn’t.

Categories
Branding & Advertising What's wrong? WTF

Why copy (and why lie about it)?

Read this (courtesy afaqs!).

Right. The creative director of an agency working for Honda Siel is not aware of arguably the most popular words of arguably the most impactful movie of last year (one that displaced even The Godfather from IMDB’s alltime #1 for a few days!) spoken by one of the most appreciated characters of popular fiction played by arguably the most admired actor last year. If we are to believe Mr. Hola, there was no one around him to remind him that ‘Why so serious?’ would invariably be connected to the Joker – not the people at Meridian (creative people I presume – that don’t watch blockbuster movies), not the people at Honda Siel.

Yes we believe you. The ‘similarity’ between your tagline and the Joker’s refrain is “totally coincidental”.

Funny thing is that the line ‘why so serious?’ does not have any connection with the alleged brief (that the article mentions) of breaking down the hierarchy in the car segment (of SUVs and hatchbacks), or of positioning the Jazz as a car in a ‘league of its own’. Why would you use the line then if it doesn‘t connect with your brief? There can only be one reason then – to cash in on the buzz that line generated very recently.

Of course the Honda Siel and Meridian people have never read, watched or heard of the Joker or maybe even Batman 🙂

Categories
Branding & Advertising What's wrong? WTF

Fantasies can crash?

If Microsoft made cars, goes the story. And it’s been ringing true for so long.

I was reminded of this story, because I saw a web ad for MS’s masterpiece browser Internet Explorer 8 today. The storyline of the ad goes thus: a lissome damsel in a frock is busy eating a sandwich in such an engrossed manner that would remind you of good ol’ Liv Tyler, while our hero is busy watching her from a distance. In the midst of this, we see the worried hero trying to look around an insurmountable obstacle, followed by the text “Fantasies can crash”. And then we see a rather rotund gentleman just standing between the two, while all we and our hero can see is his posterior. Then the hero starts making faces, from which I can only guess that the rotund gentleman has just performed an act with his posterior which causes considerable noise & air pollution.

We then see the Vista-esque dialog box asking whether you want to restore your last session or go to your homepage. And then we are informed about the groundbreaking new innovation in the new IE8 – Automatic Crash Recovery (where is the ™ guys?)!!! Of course now you are dying to use the new & improved IE8 right? With this automatic crash recovery feature that was not present so far in the IE, IE is now complete and can take on the other browsers like Firefox, Opera, Safari and Chrome, which anyways used to restore crashed browsing sessions (they can even save sessions when you are closing the window, if you preferred). Heck, even MS’s Office software do a half-decent amount of crash recovery.

But the best part of the ad is the sort of self-aware admission that “Fantasies can crash”. Refreshing to see MS admitting in their promotion itself that their software crashes, and we have to just live with it. But look at the new shiny feature — Automatic Crash Recovery! Don’t you just love the IE, now that it can restore your session after crashing it? Make it more stable and reduce crashes you said? No sir, can’t do. We’d much rather advertise the most irritating thing we can show you — our crash screen telling you that your browser crashed last time you opened it.

Coming back to cars, wonder if cars advertised like this. “Your car can crash or break down, but look at this feature — it puts you back on the road you were going on (after 3 months in the hospital or garage maybe)”. Do you want to advertise that your product does not fail (or that you have made efforts to prevent it from failing), or do you advertise that your product can fail, there’s nothing wrong with it, just look what we have added — it remembers what you were doing when it failed.

And then there is the copy — “Let’s you start from where you had stopped”. Weren’t copywriters supposed to be good at language? But then maybe in the new age of freestyle apostrophe usage, I am a purist.

Categories
Branding & Advertising What's wrong? WTF

TLA anyone?

TLAs, for those of you unaware of that acronym (which suprisingly isn’t an acronym itself), stands for Three Letter Acronym.

After the initial WTFness has subsided, I would just like to raise one simple question for marketers with the big brands out there – is OBA taught at whatever business classes you’ve attended? Now OBA, for those unaware of that too, stands for Obfuscation by Acronymisation — with that, I have scored double points for not only inventing an acronym, but also inventing a new word. Thank you, thank you.

First we had seen the ever-so-reassuring safe-for-my-health All Out mosquito repellent, which kills more mosquitoes in my bedroom because it’s loaded with extra MMR. After a big sigh of reassurance, I take another look at what the MMR stands for. It stands for Mosquito Mortality Rate. So let me get this straight — the liquid will kill more mosquitoes because it has extra mortality rate? Talk about causes and effects getting mixed up.

The second case-in-point is our good ol’ Parachute. With its misspelt (but a smart branding tactic) Advansed. You ofcourse are aware of the Parachute therapie (another one, but smart) hair oil. And its advertisements. They said their scientists have done research and found out the reasons for hair fall. Do you know what those are? They are (gasp gasp!) RDF!! Wow, you think! They have finally found what destroys the roots of hair to make them fall! This is great news! Until you look carefully to see what RDF stands for. Root Destroying Factors. Had the brand owners not come out with that advertisement, would you have known that hair roots are destroyed because of Root Destroying Factors? I am bummed!

The business world apparently loves acronyms, and those of us who have lived a part of our lives in the SGAs, the RTMs and the CRISPs, even swear by them. But such OBA leaves even the likes of us gasping for air.

And ofcourse, when the consumer gets curious and looks for the real meaning of your TLA, like I (and many others) did, do you think the brand would come across as honest and trustworthy? To me it looks like, the people developing the product did not do much work in research, but they still want to tom-tom their “efforts” and want to sound important by using acronyms and smart-looking animation. Can your brand afford such an impression?

What do you think? And do you know of any other such examples of OBA?

Categories
Branding & Advertising Society WTF

Advertising meets Politics = WTF

WTF of the day comes from our dear ol’ Congress Party (the haath people, not to be confused with haathi people).

After claiming credit for Slumdog Millionaire’s Oscar success (did they also claim credit for the never before success of the Indian contingent in the Beijing Olympics?) and a jingle claiming credit for every technological advancement that ever happened in the world and came to India, in whichever way, there is another TVC, where a couple is talking between themselves, and are happy that inflation is reduced, and prices of things from commodities to properties have come down. Never mind that millions are losing their jobs and are getting their paychecks cut, so they won’t be that thrilled about this reduced inflation.

The whole world has been looking for who is behind the recession. Is the Congress willing to take credit for it now? (albeit while trying to package it in a positive way)?

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Branding & Advertising What works?

Asian Paints: dada-dadi

I have been seeing this advert on television for some days recently, and think it’s effective.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LdvF7DK6ysI&hl=en&fs=1&w=425&h=344]

Now why do I think it’s effective? In line with the previous posts on advertising (which include quite a few reviews and dissections of ads, now that I look back at it all), let me write about this ad right here right now. Okay? So here goes.

What works:

  1. Humour. Whichever ad has humour as a strong point, it’s always the first point for me. It grabs attention, entertains and makes the ad memorable. One person’s misery is another person’s humour. And in this case, the dadaji’s misery emanating from his weak memory provides moments of pride for dadiji and amusement for the rest of us.
  2. It’s a story! Stories engage us. We love hearing and telling stories. Once upon a time we painted the house… nice! And the characters from the story tell the story in autobiographical mode… nicer!!
  3. Lather, rinse, repeat. The story is in loops. We get to understand it after two of the loops – dadaji is reminiscing about an incident from old times and remembers one artifact of the story, while dadiji knows that he has made a mistake, and corrects him. By the third time, the audience is onto the game. We already know dadaji would again be making a mistake, and dadiji would correct him.
  4. The product. The yellow bungalow is prominent in the frames throughout the ad. I think the way Asian Paints present a house in their ad is well-defined in their minds, and they do it exceptionally well. Right from the first frame I could tell it is an ad for an exterior paint, most probably from Asian Paints.
  5. The story communicates the benefit very well. Memories may fade with time, but the paint would not.