Category: India

  • Insurance Maxims

    I bet all of you guys who’ve been following IPL would know Sanju by now. Sanju, who just gets lost in his iPod music, can’t hear his wife calling him, and ends up scaring the living hell out of her. And she’s not easily scared, judging by an earlier Vodafone ad 😉 In case, you really don’t know what I’m talking about, take a look at it here.

    The Sanju situation is something that could happen to us at any point of time, and i think their understanding of the consumer mindset has been bang on target with this one. All of us, who know we’re not exactly in the healthiest of states, but haven’t done much about it since we believe in our immortality. The ad execution keeps you glued to the storyline, expecting the worst and finally delivering a ‘Oh thank God’ moment’, but leaving the message behind loud and clear. Its a story that I can identify with, and that makes it powerful.

    Its part of a series of communication from Max New York. The other two that i have seen are this and this. Though the ‘child’s dreams’ path is a heavily trodden one (HDFC’s ‘Haan, Papa’ comes to mind immediately), the other two themes were pretty good and managed to strike a chord, at least in my case. And they’re definitely a good context led follow up for this.

    The last one is the guy who’s been giving up his own dreams at various times and having his decisions forced upon him by various things like parental approval, family, its stability and security, children’s future etc, and finally during old age. The implementation is classic, as every time he almost takes a decision he sees his ‘responsibilities’ appearing before him. This one is for pension plans, and ends with its message to finally end those compromises. Again, very easy to identify with. Much better than this, for instance.

    While its easy to say that most communication these days aims for slice of life scenes, its something very difficult to execute, especially since most brands like to hog footage. The difference in this set is that it gives the story most importance, gives a context and then shows how the product offers a solution. Incidentally, I also liked the humour pitch that was in vogue earlier –  this from TATA AIG, and HDFC’s take on other financial products like Savings or Mutual Funds. I wonder why HDFC didn’t adopt this tone for insurance, maybe they felt it was too serious a subject?

    All well and good, but i always wonder about the role of brand vs performance as a factor in decision making as far as financial products go. Yes, you wouldn’t choose it if you didn’t know about it, but is heavy TV advertising the most optimal way to build equity?

    until next time, i guess TVC works as some kinda insurance 😉

  • Born tough, but advertising ruined me

    Change. Thats exactly what I’d like those Ceat guys to do about their campaign. After their TVC started airing, it took me this post to understand exactly what they meant by the ad, because I was too busy trying to figure out what was happening to notice the logo change. Also happened to see more from the same family like this, this, and this. Just because change is a constant does it mean you have to force it to happen? Couldn’t see anything wrong with a positioning like ‘Born Tough’, unless of course they either hired a new marketing head or a new agency, who, by now would wish they had the original rhino’s thick skin judging by the reviews I’m reading online.

    I wish someone could’ve explained by now what exactly has changed and why, because if i happen to see that guy on the road, I just might dip my hand into the wallet and offer him some….. change. I wonder why they didn’t tie up with TOI for their Chennai launch, after all the campaign said ‘Next Change’. The possibilities just go on – the guy sitting on a beach and the super going ‘Sea Change’, CEAT changing the model, and the old guy walking with a tee saying ‘Ex-change’, and so on.

    For a product like tyres, wouldn’t it be better if they concentrated on the product, retail and distribution, and talked about its benefits rather than talk about change. After all, the category that the brand operates in should be kept in mind before deciding on communication strategies. This kind of stuff begs something similar to that old KF-Jet-Go Air jpeg that made its rounds. In this case, MRF coming out with something on the lines of ‘No Change. Still the best’.

    Oh damn, now i can see the banner ads on rediff too!! Like the author of the post i mentioned earlier suggested, by this token, a tee should end all concerns regarding a brand’s identity change. And continuing with his take on ambient ideas, here’s one, while driving on a mountain road, you see a theatre playing ‘Darr’. A little way ahead, you see another theatre, guess what movie is playing there?

    until next time, tough luck

  • Mark diya jayein?

    Like any normal working blog, this one too is affected by the general laziness that appears around this time of the week. So, this will post will be a potpourri of sorts.

    First up, this site that i got to know about from here. (!)Yureekah, still in alpha stage, tells you where exactly brands are placing their ads online.  First request, if I have already given you my details once, please allow me to login and not repeat the process everytime i decide to visit. And no, I don’t want the computer to remember me. While it is most definitely not comprehensive, basis a couple of searches I did for Indiatimes Mail and a few other brands, I think the thought needs to be appreciated. It definitely has the potential to become a great tool, not just for knowing where brands place ads, but going a step further and analysing why they’ve done it, and perhaps in the process figuring out better places and ways to reach your own target audiences. Forget the media part, it even showed me a couple of creatives that I hadn’t seen earlier. Read more about them here.

    Meanwhile, a quick query, am I the only moron to not figure out the feed for agencyfaqs digital (not the general site feed, the digital section feed)? I’ve been spoilt by feed readers and am regularly missing out good reads!!

    The other site which i came across today is this. PracharThis, an Indian social bookmarking widget. Hmm, but first, ‘Roshini’, through ‘her’ (same) comment on almost all the sites i frequent, managed to get my attention. Whether zis (Nice Post !You should use an Indian social bookmarking widget like PrachaarThis to let your users easily bookmark your blog posts.) is a nice way of promoting the site is quite debatable. (What do ya mean I’m just peeved at being ignored by even spam? 😉 )

    Meanwhile, what does it do? Like any other widget which you can add to your blog, it allows you to add the particular site to  humsurfer, Indianpad, Tagza, all desi versions of Digg and that is definitely not something I’ve seen any other widget do. This is in addition to the regular digg, facebook, stumbleupon, del.icio.us etc that one regularly sees in such widgets. So its definitely a value add for the regular users of the digg clones, and adds a desi touch to social bookmarking widgets, but how much really is that value? I think a better understanding of the unique extra sites is required to answer that question. Any volunteers?

    Meanwhile, you can get the code for the widget (for blogger, typepad, wordpress and general websites) on the homepage itself. Good. Also, what i did find there were quite a few good links to some Indian blogs, so perhaps a nice add on would be to prompt me (when i use this widget to save a url) to visit similar urls (similar to a ‘people who added this also added..)?

    until next time, well fed?

  • One for the elephant

    आप ट्यूब says Google Translator when I asked for a translation to celebrate the launch of You Tube in India. This will give you the details including the content partners that has the likes of NDTV, Zoom, UTVi, Bindass etc. I’d written earlier about the other video sharing sites. This launch should be a huge blow to all of them unless they can really do some differentiation.
    All this attention for India had already made me feel very globally wanted 🙂 and then I read this in the morning about Yahoo India launching a different kind of search – Glue. What is different? Lets try an example – Aamir Khan. Unlike say, a Google/Yahoo search which gives you links, and you can make it images or videos or blogs etc at a button click, what the new Yahoo Search does is give you not just the links, but also quick facts, videos, images, (boring?) Yahoo Answers , LastFM top tracks ( :p you didn’t expect those ). Interesting, don’t you think, even though it would be significant only for celeb entities and not for people like moi? Of course, Live Search does give some images, but this goes beyond that. And for now, i think, it happens only in India, and so we’re no longer glueless in search (okay, i shall refrain) 🙂
    I had this sense of deja vu, which i thought was because of a blog platform experiences of a similar nature, but I was wrong. A bit of search in my Favourites pointed me to this. Not surprisingly, from yahoo themselves, and a while back. Okay, this one doesn’t throw up Radio (Yahoo Music? for international version), but hey, its got Wiki, and you can customise your search. Take it for a spin and see if you can discover more.
    I have a suggestion, considering that you’re looking at search, and the world is going social, how about including one of my fave Yahoo acquisitions del.icio.us also in this new search page? Think about it, if i have searched for some stuff on our currently used example Aamir Khan, and if i found it interesting, I’d have bookmarked it. Of course, while privacy settings do exist, a lot of this kind of content would be public. Which means that the search might also throw up (through the del.icio.us links) some interesting but not so well known links about Aamir. In addition, Yahoo also gets some mileage for Del.icio.us.
    But meanwhile, sigh, all this for the 9% broadband penetration. The elephant had better get a move on, if all this interest is to be sustained.
    until next time, a search engine for soulsearching 😉

  • Bubble 2.0

    This could be called a misleading title, since it doesn’t have anything to do with the doomsday messages for web2.0, but working in a tabloid sometimes has its effects.

    I’d written earlier on how a few of yesteryear brands were staging a comeback of sorts. Cinthol was one of them, and I’d written how the website just wasn’t happening. Well, according to this, they’ve just done a revamp.

    I’m not going to get into the review of the site, this captures it well, though a bit harshly 🙂 , since i thought the execution by Interactive Avenues was decent, if not great. To begin with, lets take a look at the rationale – “Godrej wanted us to create a platform where the youth could find out about Cinthol’s brand values and which they would find entertaining enough to continue their interaction with the brand. In simple words, ‘take the real life freshness and energetic Cinthol experience online’.”

    While I agree that the digital medium is definitely worth every praise it gets, and the youth does connect to it in a major way, does it mean that every brand, irrespective of its category, mode of distribution, value proposition to the user etc jump onto it, without a real clue on the tangible gains that can be derived?

    Back to Cithol, this is only Phase 1, according to the article, tie ups with Yahoo, rediff, Zapak etc will generate site traffic. No social media for now. Phew! Assume (for now) that they have content in place, how much of an impact does a communication of brand ethos online and a few games have on really buying the soap/deo offline? I’m really not convinced about ‘Dude, that flash game was cool, let’s buy the soap’. Unless the idea is to start a dhobi ghaat, there is a limit to what community building can be expected to achieve.

    Meanwhile, there’s another bubbly player, according to this article. Even though the article says that the site design is not exactly excellent, at least in the case of Surf Excel there is a possibility of finding a tangible connect between stain removing methods online and buying the product offline. But they seem to have gone to the other extreme by forcing users to give addresses, and thereby standing a good chance of er, staining the relationship.

    I personally think that brands have to take a long look at their objectives before they ride the bandwagon.

    until next time, daily soap