The turkey of the month
This grim reality of life came home to me when I was watching the recent advertisements launching Idea cellular service in Mumbai. I put myself in the shoes of the agency team and the client team, who had just put together the Idea School campaign, and shown themselves to be capable of creating a really great idea, and executing it really well. And then, this turkey!
OK, I know the brief would have gone something like this: “Right guys! We’re launching in Mumbai, and I want a breakthrough campaign, all media, blanketing the city, telling the lucky Mumbaikars that Idea cellular is finally here.” And the response was – get yourself an Idea cellular connection, and you belong to Mumbai??!!! So, before Idea cellular, we Mumbaikars lived in limbo? Or hung about in purgatory like a few million Trishankus? And if so, so what? Why should we choose Idea? Where’s the proposition for the brand? Where’s the killer punch telling us what’s in it for us if we choose Idea cellular for Mumbai? Something tells me that what we are seeing is one of the classical agency cop-outs – the ‘launch’ campaign, which is just to create the ‘noise’, the ‘impact’ of launch – and soon enough we’ll have the campaign proper which will tell prospective customers in Mumbai why they should choose Idea. If that does happen, it will be worth debating as to why the client and the agency deemed it fit to release advertising worth some crores of rupees, whose only objective was to create awareness, where our case books abound with examples of others having achieved both awareness and putting forth a ‘reason why’ in the same campaign. Awareness can be achieved by visibility alone; to tell a ‘reason why’ story needs an idea. However, we shall wait and watch before we get to this debate.
I wonder that the agency creative head let this campaign pass, and I wonder even more that the client bought it. In my last article, I had mentioned the need for recognising good ideas and throwing out the chaff – this time, my guess is that in this instance, quality control had gone south.
I realise it’s a helluva tough challenge to follow-up on a great achievement. Years ago I used to work with Rediffusion (now Rediffusion-DY&R) in Kolkata, and we had a paints account called Jenson & Nicholson, where we had faced the same challenge. The agency had created a landmark ad campaign on outdoor – “whenever you see colour, think of us.” This ran for some 8 years or more, but after 3 years, the pressure was on to find the follow-up, or to refresh it with something even more brilliant. And we couldn’t come up with anything close in terms of quality.
The Idea School campaign has an idea that can indeed change the world; the Mumbai launch campaign has an idea that’s really bad, a terrible, godawful, seriously bad idea, which in no way can change anybody’s world. The only saving grace is that this campaign will run its course in a few weeks’ time, and then it will vanish from our memories even faster. At least I hope so.
Tell me why…
This brings me to one of the mysteries of the last fortnight, which also I hope disappears soon – Aamir Khan doing the ardhanari act in the Tata-Sky TVC.
Fine acting, changing from a woman to a man and vice versa by doing a half turn live on camera, all in a single take – pretty brilliant as a performance. But why do this ad anyways? Tata-Sky has been around for some 2 years; in some markets, it is a market leader. The virtues of the brand Tata do not need explication or even emphasis, after more than a century in the Indian market.
So, what’s the problem? Was it that customers did not understand what Sky was doing in the Tata-Sky offering? Can’t be – homeowners are happy to buy a Tata product, just because they know it’s a Tata branded product; they are happy to shop at Westside and Croma since they know these are Tata initiatives – they don’t know or care to know about who Tata have partnered with. And in any case, all that the TVC tells us of Sky is one half sentence about world-class quality from Sky. And further, if customers had expressed any apprehensions about not knowing what Sky brings to the table, that should have been addressed at the time of launch of the DTH service.
So, I don’t get it. As a Tata-Sky user from the beginning, the TVC gives me no additional reinforcement about my purchase decision. I don’t see the strategic or tactical need for this ad.
The one concern that I do have with the product is that the Tata-Sky set-top box blinks out 3 minutes before a shower, and in our household we use this as an early warning system in the monsoons. This doesn’t happen with the other STB we have which we got from our cable-wallah. I would like to know why the two STBs behave differently – a simple phone call would be sufficient; I don’t want to see a TVC telling us all why the pre-shower warning is a free bonus that comes with buying a Tata-Sky STB.
The big turkey
The big sneeze blows away enemy tanks. The big scream clears a traffic jam. The big moustache scythes through enemies. The big, I mean really mind-bogglingly unbelievably fat, king creates a hole big enough to find water. All this to sell Big TV DTH system. The promise, as far as I can decipher: MPEG-4 technology, and double the number of channels. So I guess the proposition is BigTV gives me more than the competition. Interesting to me as a customer, so I guess the agency can say that the ad worked. Since the communication re the proposition comes in the last third of the ad, this last third worked all right. What happened in the first two-thirds? What was this part doing to help or build up to the proposition?
The point is this: I guess that the idea was – somewhere during the ideation stage – “bigger than life”. But in the execution, it becomes big moustache, the big sneeze????? Who’s keeping quality control? Who’s out there saying, “This is no good; I need you guys to better than this?”
What can one say? Some things leave one bereft of speech. Respect for the laws of libel and slander have something to do with it. A visit to the website home page (http://www.bigtv.co.in/index.htm) told me a lot more, and I am quite interested – the ads merely succeeded in putting me off my tall glass of the stuff that cheers and inebriates.
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