It’s showtime, folks!

Some of the advertisements that cut through the clutter on TV, and make life less of a grudge...

Tata Indicom: Leveraging on the power of a simple ‘hello’.

The ICC T20 World Cup is over. India followed Australia, New Zealand, Bangladesh, England and several other losers out of the United Kingdom. Simultaneously, a nation of a billion people shifted their attention to other crucial and intelligence enhancing activities like watching K serials. A few others realised there was a recession on and they had to actually work while the rest of them went back to doing what they had been doing for quite some time – nothing.

I too was at a loose end given the fact that for a few days there was actually no cricket match on TV. (Miracles do happen!). So I went back to doing what I do, which is watching commercials on TV.

I realise that producing commercials that “reward” viewers and actually “work” at the marketplace is increasingly hard to come by, given the fact that we live in recessionary (there’s that popular word again) times. Clients tend to look for advertising that is more hard-working (read boring) with the brand name repeated in every possible manner and shown a zillion times. Yet a few commercials still pass muster. Let me share the reasons why I liked a few out of the several that passed me by. A few that I watched without flipping the channels and the few that motivated me to write about.

Hello Dada, hello off side!

I am not a Tata Indicom user so I have no idea how good their network or coverage is. They too could be like my service provider whose ads are much better than their coverage. But let me give their coverage the benefit of the doubt and stay with the advertising that I can safely comment about.
Saurav Ganguly is not my favourite cricketer, not that my opinion should matter to anybody. But there is one aspect of him that must be mentioned. Ganguly is someone whom you can love or hate, but someone whom you can never ignore. Not surprisingly, this is the guiding principle for creating ads. You can either love them or hate them but you can never ignore them. Neither can you ignore the Tata Indicom ad that is built around a strong proposition and yet built around Saurav Ganguly the toast of Bengal.

The commercial is set in a bus, presumably in Kolkata. There is a Sardarji reading the newspaper who says gloatingly ‘Dada ka innings katham’. The guy in the left presumably a Dada fan (is there any other type in Kolkata?) is indignant. He raises his voice and talks about Dada’s offside strokes, his strike rate, how he is a tiger and some such stuff. But one’s imagination has to work overtime to figure out the words as the animated Bengali gentleman says “hello, hello” after every other word, a reference to the network of other service providers. The commercial goes on to say that Tata Indicom users would not be subjected to the same tension thanks to the advanced digital network which it provides.

Very often powerful advertising ideas are a function of observation of consumers and their problems. How often have we watched people in trains or buses shouting at the top of their voices and sharing their intimate family or business problems to whoever cares to listen even as they keep shouting “hello, hello!” thanks to the iffy network that they are presently using.
Nor is this all. There is another commercial set in a restaurant. When giving the menu to a young family the waiter is fittingly turned out in a costume with strong oriental overtones. The menu presumably includes some dishes like shrimp, lobster and some other fried stuff, all of which is interspersed with ‘hellos’ to the bemusement of the wife and the complete confusion of the young kid who asks for a ‘fried hello’. To add to the confusion, the phone rings and the waiter breaks into a fresh flurry of ‘hellos’. The commercial ends with the statement that Tata Indicom users do not go through the same heartache thanks to the advanced digital network that the service provider claims.

Advertising is essentially cutting through the clutter and this commercial does that simply by the use of the word ‘hello’. I read somewhere that the word most used in the world is ‘hello”. Why wouldn’t it be indeed, if networks are so pathetic!

Hey it’s about me!

The other commercial I like is one where there is a middle-aged lady who is very tense because her husband has not come home on time (A situation I can relate to). The husband comes home sheepishly and gets it from his wife (been there done that). She tells him about how he left the house and said he would go for a cup of coffee and then how he had gone for a spin in his friend’s new car (of course, one hardly needs to mention that the spin was from Lucknow to Kanpur) and would he ever mature?

The unrepentant husband to whom promises are like buttercups swears that from the next day he would show her how he would be a reformed character.
The product window talks about Max New York Life which inspires ‘awara gardi’ like this. I can already imagine my retired life as the male character seems to think and behave so much like me! Nor does the commercial end, when the son gloats over the father getting it from the mother, the father reminds him about how he has to go to work and do boring stuff!

The next commercial in the series talks about the father telling his wife that they would be going all the way to Kolkata for a wedding. Whose? A friend of a friend of a friend who comes with our hero for his morning walk! Once again the confidence of the retirement plan and money under his belt leads our retired hero to a path of ‘awara gardi’. As someone who hopes to join the club I have nothing but the highest regard for the inspirational hero that I hope to be one day!

Yet, I have a problem. While I had seen these commercials several times over and laughed at my friend’s travails, I could not recall the brand name.
In fact, when I wanted to retrieve the commercial from YouTube to see it once again, the technophobe that I am, I kept telling my tech-savvy young colleague to look for a commercial of Kotak Mahindra. Many years ago, I used to idolise my uncle who was a movie expert. So in one of our conversations, I referred to a film, I knew the scene sequence even, but could not remember the title of the film though I kept insisting that it was a great film and he promptly told me, “It can’t be a great film if you can’t remember the name.” For some strange reason I remembered him now.

To continue the analogy, the script would have served any pension fund admirably though all credit to Max New York life for thinking of it first. But still a worrying thought – are we merely doing a great ad or are we appropriating the idea exclusively for ourselves?

Come to me I’m the real McCoy

The last commercial that finds a place in this piece has a wailing baby and the mother is busy getting her hands ‘mehendied’ – if such a word exists in the lexicon. So the child is passed from one unwilling handler to the other as the baby’s wailing increases in volume. The situation seems to be almost unmanageable as none of the people who are asked to hold the baby are in control of the baby or the situation! But thankfully the mother has finished what she has do and picks up the baby which instantly stops crying and starts gurgling happily. The commercial ends with the voice over exhorting the viewer to bring his Maruti to the authorised Maruti outlet.

What a simple and yet powerful analogy! I got some hidden meanings. The car is something very precious to the owner, like the child is to the parent, how others cannot handle it with the same love and affection… a whole host of things that were never said in the commercial . But an endearing commercial to my mind at least.

Yes, there is hope for the human race yet. There may not be cricket on my telly just now, but at least advertising like this makes life less of a drudge.
Hello, you still there?

(Ramanujam Sridhar is CEO, brand-comm, and the author of One Land, One Billion Minds.)