FastTrack gone offtrack with its advertising?

Radio One was recently airing some advertising for FastTrack’s new Army Collection. They were inviting women to send in jingles that go with a marching tune, and played a sample jingle on air. Here are the lyrics to that sample:

Get up and leave
if he tries to kiss your hand
He’s a one-girl man;
He ain’t a one-night stand

Corollary: if one comes across a girl wearing a Fast Track army watch, can one presume she is looking for a one-night-stand?

Jokes apart, why would FastTrack want to restrict their customer base to an ultra-liberal crowd instead of having mass appeal to the entire 18-25 age group, irrespective of how conservative/liberal they are, irrespective of what their preferences in relationships are? Does their advertising tactic make sense for a consumer products' company?

Nike & holi

Managed to come across some very good advertisements recently, thought I'll write about them:

Nike



Not only has the airing of this advertisment been timed very well with the world cup season, it also captures the Indian love for the game very accurately. As soon as the advertisement starts, the traffic stops, and the cricketers take over. It doesn't matter who's bowling or who's batting.. it's just the game that has to be played.. the game has to go on till the fat lady sings, or in this case, the traffic starts moving.

When the first batsman hits the ball too hard and the bowler goes "kya kar raha hai, yaar?", it's almost like the kids playing in a neighbourhood street with rules like "if you hit the ball beyond that wall, you're out". There's more that makes the ad very Indian - the chicken that pops its head out of the basket, the kerosene lanterns, the elephant that adds to the madness, the confused thulla.. it's hard to make out it's a Nike ad except for the less than half-a-second frame where the familiar swoosh pops by.

---

A donation
A friend shared this link with me on the day of Holi. Unless you've seen this before, make sure you watch this clip till the end.



I'm surprised on not having seen this on television. I would expect this to be a lot more effective than the Aishwarya Rai advertisements that used to be aired on the same subject.

Advertising for Morphy Richards

I spent some time this weekend working on an advertising assignment that was due today. We were asked to prepare a single-page print advertisement for Morphy Richards, for any/all of their products.

So here's how I went thinking about this assignment:

1. Identify the attributes of the current advertising Morphy Richards uses:
1. Clean advertising & simplicity - no garish images
2. Their products don't have any major differentiator, so current advertising doesn't use the "buy this because we're better" tag line. Instead, their advertisements try to instil a positive association of the product.
2. Most of their products are for the homemaker (read the woman in the household) - the ad has to appeal to women, it would influence buying decisions on their entire product range.
   
3. Use creativity to generate emotional appeal - reinforce the feeling of homeliness with Morphy Richards products.
4. Identify which product(s) I want to create the advertisement for. I ended up deciding between sandwich makers and hair dryers.

Once these decisions were done, I went about using a combination of google's image search, my creativity, and my skills at gimp & MS paint to come up with these.


The first one


This one turned out to be really clean with a "can't hurt the eye" white background. But the image was bad - it was a sandwich that wasn't from a sandwich maker! Surely the prof (or anyone else) would see through that. And see through that, my quaddie did. Back to the drawing board...


Another sandwich maker ad



So this one featured an improved tag line. Had gotten rid of the "A sandwich" trailer. But there were three problems with this one:

1. the colours are not uniform throughout - half the ad is in a shade of brown and the other half in a bluish grey
2. the sandwich is ugly - it is a very greasy sandwich that no health-concious homemaker would ever giver her child.
3. In hindsight, the tag line doesn't make any sense. How can a sandwich be the next best thing to sliced bread - a sandwich should be better than sliced bread, shouldn't it? I'd worked on the tag line from the phrase "the greatest invention since sliced bread", but I'd lost the meaning somewhere during the transition.

Time to move over to another product - let's check out the hair dryers.

The first hair dryer ad
So, who would buy a hair dryer? A woman who has a bad hair day. Hmm, more googling and more work on gimp made me come up with this:


All right, now I'm violating the cleanliness principle. Yeah, the colours probably look good, and the format is fairly simple - visual description of the problem, textual description of the problem, visual description of the solution. But the woman is not right - she looks agitated. And people never look agitated in a Morphy Richards ad.

So the challenge is now - come up with a visual description of a bad hair day that would appeal to women, without indicating any agitation.

Well, more googling, and this is what we come up with:

The final one



And did the ad work? I don't know - I submitted this to the prof only today. But a few "oh cho cute" comments from the target segment did make me think it's come out well :-)

Thanks V, I couldn't have done this assignment without your feedback.

Very Funny Ads

Check this site out: http://veryfunnyads.com/

Another ad mismatch

Paresh Rawal danced to a "ta-ra-ra-ra-ra-ri, pizza aaye free" for Domino's. That tune doesn't seem to go very well in the Arshad Warsi ad, does it?

Advertisements, rebranding & bias

• KitKat's latest advertisement shows people wearing pants twice the size they usually wear. So, is KitKat now a health food?
• Sony Ericson advertises a music player.. it takes a while for the viewer to realise it's a mobile phone. Got to admit, I love this ad; should try to locate it on youtube sometime.
• ThumsUp rebrands itself as a men's drink, something that women won't understand.

Seriously, what's up with these brands?

--------------------------------------------

When on of our professors fired a "name three ads that you've seen today", we were stumped for a few minutes. He went on to say, "See, that's advertising for you. There's hardly any recall." I agreed with him then. But now I don't. If you ask people to name three political news headlines they've seen today, chances are good that they'll be stumped on that question too. That, dear readers, is selection bias.

--------------------------------------------

BTW, as the first three lines show, I seem to fare better on ad recall than the news recall :-( I hope advertising turns out to be a good elective next term.