The quirky ‘Ramesh, Suresh’ characters are back not just on the TV screens but also through an YouTube channel. In an interesting use of the channel [another recent one being Airtel] we have a movie called, ‘The Date Fillum’ in episodic form – the story can be taken forward by clicking on one of the two options at the end of every video. The first video [The Adventure Begins Here] has over 300,000 views as…
Competitive advertising can be fun. The Times of India fired the first salvo against The Hindu in Chennai recently. In my blog post I had noted: ‘the needless skin-show (not just in the city supplement) even in the mainline articles, the celebrity gossip in city supplements and the prominence given to ‘Page 3 culture’ you have ‘sensationalism’ as a residual brand association’. The Hindu has identified the same chink in TOI’s armor and have produced…
So, Samsung has released yet another ad poking fun at the Apple fan boys. This time, the turn-by-turn navigation feature in the Samsung Galaxy S2 is the whip with which the Mac community is sought to be beaten. The earlier efforts were on similar lines [no pun intended] touting the bigger screen or some other feature as superior to the iPhone. Lets see what the campaign has done. Nowadays, there’s nothing like a country-specific campaign.…
Unilever is launching a new fragrance of Axe and its for women. Yes, the brand pitched squarely at men and promising to transform all men into ‘chic magnets’ is now introducing Anarchy – a fragrance for ‘him and her’. The launch involves, not just conventional advertising but a graphic novel whose plot can be shaped by consumer contributions. That in itself was interesting. But the execution takes it to another level. The campaign includes not…
Must hand it to W+K. They have consistently produced great work for a diverse set of brands, Lurpak being one of them. They first had ‘Saturday is breakfast day’, followed by ‘Kitchen Odyssey’. Common to both were outstanding production values and a mouth-watering visual feel – great food advertising. Their latest work for Lurpak Lightest is equally mouth watering – albeit showcasing vegetables – justifying the ‘healthy doesn’t have to be humdrum’ claim. According to…
When I saw the extension of the ‘Har friend zaroori hot a hai’ theme campaign into short films, I thought it was a brilliant idea. Slicing the many types of friends [who were anyway portrayed through vignettes in the montage of the theme film] into little stories brought alive the insight even more. The ‘kanjoos friend’ TVC was a killer among that lot. The thought has been taken further in a series of ads on…
There was a clear pattern to online activities of Indian brands a little while ago: create brand website, drive traffic to it through web banners in mass or niche portals. The content on these brand websites too followed a pattern: information about brands or the current campaign, videos of ads and the mandatory wallpapers for download. Sometimes I wonder why anyone would think that a user would replace his current desktop wallpaper of a nature…
There’s no telling what goes viral in social media nowadays. A recent slogan for Philippine Tourism, ‘It’s more fun in the Philippines’ has caught the fancy of consumers in social media. Agency: BBDO Guerrero As far as tourism slogans go the line follows the trend of describing the feeling of visiting a country, creating an aura of expectation: Incredible India, Surprising Singapore and so on. In today’s media world the spontaneous reaction to the slogan…
2011 was a forgettable year for most: economic woes, natural disasters, death of so many business & entertainment icons…the list was quite endless. For the Indian advertising industry it was quite an eventful year – a lot of discussion centered around the high profile work and growth of smaller, independent agencies [Taproot, Happy, Scarecrow] the movement of some senior level agency folks and the acquisition by international holding companies. In terms of creative, several TV…