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AMIT BAPNA
For this story, we met an elated and recently appointed president at the passenger vehicle
business unit of Tata Motors, Mayank Pareek. Elated be-cause he’d just got to know that Tata Motors had made it to the haloed 3rd r a n k i n g fo r t h e first time in the J.D. Power’s Customer Satisfaction report. Pareek has taken on an ambitious revival plan at a company that has been bat-tling both a percep-tion issue and a real challenge – of being a laggard in the pas-senger car segment. (As per Society of Indian Automobile Manufacturers (SIAM) April- September figures, Maruti Suzuki still holds 53.42% mar-ket share as against 5.65% of Tata Motors.) He does have a
task at hand, most would agree, even as he is getting ready to fire from all quarters.
The country’s largest automo-bile company, in a first-ever, has announced a global brand ambassador for its passenger vehicles: the Argentina–born soccer icon Lionel Messi (28).
Says Pareek, “The big-gest challenge that is being addressed with this association is that we want customers to associate our brands with the ‘cool’ quo-tient.” Besides being a huge fit, Tata Motors is on the rebound and like Messi achieved success with his re-lentless hard work, we
will succeed too, he adds. The brand has just launched the first campaign from this association #madeofgreat that has been conceptualised by Soho Square and filmed in Barcelona.
Continued on Pg 4 >>
Getting Messi on-board is a play in the Indian as well as global market
Why Facebook hopes its super-smart digital assistant won’t be ‘creepy’Facebook exec David
Marcus promises that its
new, incredibly ambitious
virtual assistant, M, won’t be
creepy.
Right now M has only rolled
out to select people in the
San Francisco Bay Area,
where they’ve started using
the human-powered service
to complete tasks like order-
ing flowers, booking flights,
or sending parrots to some-
one’s office.
Facebook imagines a world
where M would remind you
of a friend’s birthday, sug-
gest a local restaurant, and
then book a table, without
the user having to expend
any effort whatsoever.
Marcus wants M to be in-
credibly proactive, helping
the user complete tasks be-
fore they even realise they
needed them done.
But to reach that level of
proactiveness, the virtual
assistant would need to
know a lot of information
about you. Couldn’t that
start feeling a little freaky?
“While this is a very popular
theme for news, I think
there’s zero creepiness
when there’s a lot of utility,”
Marcus responded. “The
minute it gets creepy is
when a company gets a lot
of information and doesn’t
give anything back.”
(Source:
businessinsider.com)
Pg2 Pg3 Pg3
INSI
DE
When marketers make wor-ried noises about growing clutter, they are typically referring to ads other than their own and the actual content on vari-
ous media. However, advertisers seeking to make a dent in Diwali have an additional layer of clutter to contend with — the lives of their consumers. Even for ordinarily reclu-sive types, Diwali is an occasion to reconnect with family and friends, stuff faces to burst-
ing, share old memories and make a few new ones. And yes, pious messaging on media — social and regular — notwithstanding, get in touch with their inner pyromaniac.
For advertisers, this makes leaping aboard the Diwali bandwagon a challenging task. But one that has to be done, irrespective. Says Prashant Peres, director – marketing (chocolates), Mondelez India, “If you look at Nielsen and cluster what I call the gifting part of the portfolio, it usually accounts for 6% of the market. That doubles during the
festive time.” Electronic goods majors and retail-ers have been known to describe the season as practically being like an “extra quarter.” A lot of the advertising in this category is of course of the brutally functional variety — pushing freebies, gold coins and ‘assured gifts’.
However mere functional appeals may not be the way to go, particularly during Diwali. In a study called The Diwali Effect, Shailendra Gupta, vice president, TNS, points out that the ads that succeed, go be-yond mere activation and short term results.
Continued on Pg 4 >>
Fireworks & Cries
Will Messi Help Tata Motors Dribble Ahead?
DELSHAD IRANICommercial breaks and YouTube-hour during Diwali are full of tearful homecom-ings, warm reunions and sud-den bursts of altruistic deeds. In fact, most Diwali ads feel like they are created with the hope that it’ll prompt us all to make the cryface à la Carrie Mathison from the TV show ‘Homeland’ (see photo). Says Sumanto Chattopadhyay, ECD, South Asia, Ogilvy & Mather, “Most brands feel that they need to associate themselves with the heartwarming emo-tions of this family festival. However, this leads to a certain sameness to the communica-tion.” As a result, he points out, it becomes more about the brand values of Diwali rather than the brand values of the advertiser. Among those which have avoided the tear trap this Diwali are JWT with a film for Wintech which chronicles a firework prank derailed due to sound-proof glass and a Big Bazaar film called ‘Paper Patakha’ by DDB Mudra. The latter steers clear of sapvertising by replacing tears with pranks when children create an ingenious paper noise-maker. Thus urging people to enjoy a more pollution free
Diwali. “The way it is done makes it a bigger idea than a mere occasion-specific ad,” says Chattopadhyay. Lowe’s Arun Iyer agrees for the most part, but doesn’t quite see how
it’s connected to what Big Bazaar actually does around
the festive season. It’s a fine balance between meaningfully reflecting the haze of emotion that surrounds Diwali so people can relate to the message and fulfilling the brand’s needs. Get it wrong and you’ll be the one who needs a tissue and water-proof mascara this Diwali.
Making a Diwali ad is easy. Making one that endures long past the festival is a lot tougher. By Ravi Balakrishnan and Delshad Irani
How Do You Crack Diwali?
Tanishq
Coca-Cola - Do Diye Zyada
Cadbury’s Celebrations
Urban Ladder
INFLUENCER SINFLUENCER
6 things that are wrong with the current state of Influencer Marketing Programs
The Rise and Fall of the 60-second SpielbergsBy Hari Krishnan
Drive Hard With A Vengeance “When everybody is presenting one format of bike to the market, we are presenting something different,” says Rajiv Bajaj By Lijee Philip & Ketan Thakkar
The Great Indian #Startup SwayamvarHowever dire the circumstances, startups don’t stop advertising. With myriad options avail-able now, who would they choose as their partner? BE’s Shephali Bhatt finds out
Who better to kickstart the flagging fortunes of Tata Motors than the world’s most famous footballer?
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THE ECONOMIC TIMES NOVEMBER 11-17, 2015
Product: ETNEWMumbaiBS PubDate: 11-11-2015 Zone: BrandEquity Edition: 1 Page: BEFP User: sandeepd0203 Time: 11-05-2015 23:19 Color: CMYK
Why is the cloud laden with more examples of failed inf luencer programs than suc-cessful ones? Why is it that despite buzz
in the digital ecosphere, influencer pro-grams are regarded with suspicion in the marketer circuit? Here are six reasons:
Anybody can be an InfluencerThere was a time when getting a blue tick of Twitter verification next to your han-dle was akin to attaining digital knight-hood; an era when subject matter experts were regarded as inf luencers. Now, tweeters prefix titles like ‘Sir’ and ‘Lord’ to their usernames themselves and any-body who signs up for an influencer mar-keting program becomes an influencer. “For ‘X’ amount of money, they will tweet just about anything, thereby commodi-tising the market meant for advocacy wingers,” says Karthik Nagarajan, na-tional director of content and social me-dia at GroupM.
Loyalty, what loyalty?To make things worse, these self-pro-claimed influencers aren’t even faith-ful to one brand per day. You see a user tweet about garam masala, gadgets and couture fashion in the same day and ask yourself if she’s a Wonder Woman. It’s even more questionable when they do it with brands in the same category. “You’ll see them tweet-endorsing Flipkart in the morning and Snapdeal by noon,” Prince Khanna, founder of influencer market-ing platform Eleve Media points out. Unfortunately for them, marketers are taking note. Says Sunil Raina, business head of Xolo smartphones: “Currently, majority of influencers are trying to in-fluence their followers on everything so the credibility is at an all-time low.”
Influencers can be influencedAdvertising in the digital world works like a newspaper, if you ask Sudip Ghose, VP of marketing at VIP Industries. “Influencers ought to do what an edito-rial does for the brand. Create credible PR. Which is why your PR agency ex-tracts twice the value of a rate card. But at some places editorials can be bought,” he adds. And that becomes an issue. “As a follower, it’s a betrayal of my trust if you’re thrusting paid content in my face without putting so much as a disclaim-er that it’s an advertisement. And as a brand, why would I want to be seen as someone who pays random people to say anything about me? What does that make me?” asks Kopal Doshi, a digital media strategist and an active Twitterati (@HighHeelsWaali).
‘Content is king’ is tanking‘Content is king’ is the new ‘Honesty is the best policy’. It’s just been reduced to an adage that no one really follows. Agency drafts tweets and all the hired influenc-ers copy-paste it on their timelines. “It’s like rigged tweets. They create nothing but noise,” says Doshi. It’s because of this
phenomenon that ‘trending on twitter’ has become a joke now, GroupM’s Nagarajan feels. Earlier trends used to depict the pulse of the market. Now they’re just a waste of screen space. If you type a trend-ing hashtag, you’re most likely to discover no meaningful conversations but empty tweets designed only to gain volume.
Trending can be (and is being) paid forBrands are happier paying `4 lakh for a promoted trend than making a hashtag trend organically, notes Eleve’s Khanna. The modus operandi is as follows: Get a few affordable influencers, pay them to
tweet the same content 30-80 times a day. Focus on more frequency per user than good content. The problem is – a trending hashtag doth not make a successful in-fluencer marketing program. Because,..
RoI is MIA (Missing in action)With a trending hashtag you might reach out to lakhs of people but RoI is in the en-gagement. “And for a reach of lakhs, the engagement is usually not more than 100-120 people,” says Khanna. Even for the reach, there’s no numerical way to justify the numbers, says Priyal Sanghavi – brand manager (digital) at Vidhu Vinod Chopra Films, who’s worked on several influencer outreach programs in her previous stints. Brands follow the herd and take the in-fluencer route but lose interest midway because as Khanna puts it: “No RoI starts getting on their nerves eventually.” Before you know, the strategy turns into a formality. Since the marketer is only allocating 1% of his digital budget on the program, his worry becomes pro-portional to the amount spent. He stops caring about what kind of influencer the agency is getting on board. The agency, given its shoestring budget, gets the most economic of all. And that takes us back to the first hurdle in improving the current state of influencer marketing programs.
Two decades ago, it was a common no-tion among unassuming neighbours, friends of parents, old teachers and gro-cery store owners that one’s advertising profession was about painting hoardings on busy streets.
Since then, the industry has been through a journey, reinventing norms, partnering brands with storytelling and fostering a culture of creative messaging that went beyond mere branding. Brands became authors of content and engaged audiences. Pepsi, Perfetti, Axe, Vodafone, Airtel and several other brands took on the mandate of entertainment.
Beyond recall and memorability, en-tertainment and ‘enjoyability’ of adver-tising evolved as an imperative during ad pre-tests. The industry created for itself an iconic status and ‘60-second Spielbergs’ were born in agencies.
Advertising became the sourcing ground for path-breaking human insights and creativity, which even Bollywood began emulating. This changed, of course, in the new millen-nium when the roles got reversed due to a number of factors.
Firstly, cinema broke new ground with a new breed of writers and directors, scripts and treatments that engaged and surprised younger audiences like never before. Risk taking by brave produc-ers helped young creative minds break
rules and fail, but also allowed them many successes. On the other hand, au-thors of advertising, with little appetite for risk and even smaller authority for underwriting them, stopped experi-menting and began relying on tried-and-tested formulae, thereby eroding audi-ence connect and engagement.
Other variables notwithstanding, it is
often argued that Cinema always had a larger canvas, the advantage of longer duration and more footage. Advertising has perpetually been challenged by the size of its canvas — a few seconds, gradu-ally reducing from 60 to 30 and at least on TV, heading south. In all this, the perfected storytelling format of context-setting, emotional build-up, and defin-
ing moments has been impacted signifi-cantly. Recently, Piyush Pandey said that “you can’t always say everything in 30 seconds”. But the currency of 30 too has depleted. A recent analysis of FMCG adver-tising slots across major TV channels revealed that just between 2013 and 2015, the average commercial duration (ACD) has shrunk from 24 seconds to 21 sec-onds. And if one considers prime time slots, the figure would stand under twenty seconds, at around 18 or 19.
This is thanks to the two-year old 10+2 rule, following which channels restrict ad time to ten minutes in an hour’s slot. With the supply side fixed and limited in-ventory; the growing num-ber of advertisers within that slot also has impacted ACDs. During the same period, the rise in number of brands within the same inventory is over 32% in some channels. So less is be-ing shared with more, leaving everyone with suboptimal levels.
The number of first-time advertisers is mind-boggling. Thanks to the infusion of
PE funds into tech and startup business-es, over 2,000 first-time advertisers have entered the media market in just one year. So it’s a landscape dotted with new
brand announcements and ‘recall’ inducing messages.
Fragmentation of audi-ences is another variable. Seventy-six new TV chan-nels were launched last year, including those in re-gional and niche categories like cookery, youth, general entertainment and music, further splitting audiences. Viewership has shown a de-cline across many channels, owing to newer media tak-ing up peoples’ attention.
Added to this is the multi-ple-screen behaviour, which contributes to further frag-mentation and lower ad engagement. A recent ZO Live Panel revealed that over 55% people are either on a mobile or laptop while simultaneously watching TV. Activities include surf-ing (74%), chatting (73%)
and Facebook (65%) within an operating range of 87 to 142 minutes.
Online video platforms, though offer-ing lower reach than TV, did temporar-
ily come to the rescue of long format storytelling, but that too was short lived. While creative teams rejoiced at YouTube offering the luxury of long format films, the audience doesn’t’ seem to be lapping it up; on an average the completed video view rates (people who have watched the whole video) stands at a mere 8% for films longer than 60 sec-onds and 12% for those less than sixty. Today, the recommended optimal video lengths are between 30-45 seconds. One can indulge in producing fanciful 60 and 90-seconders, but there are greater chances that people might skip them.
This radically altered media land-scape is forcing us to rethink audience interests, role of brands and expecta-tions from advertising. While brands can (and should find ways to) leverage the potential of owned media there is an issue with marketing bandwidth to handle an ever-increasing laundry list of owned assets. But media today is like a busy, crowded expressway with hordes of new names fighting to get basic brand awareness and recall; TV spots that ap-pear rapidly and disappear before one blinks are nothing but hoardings on the highway. Maybe the unassuming neigh-bour from the distant past was correct after all..
(The author is Managing Director, ZenithOptimedia India)
THE RISE AND FALL OF THE 60-SECOND SPIELBERGSByInvitation
HAS THE GRAND PROMISE OF BRAND STORYTELLING BEEN REDUCED TO A MERE GATHERING OF VIEWS?
HARI KRISHNAN
Over 2,000 first-time
advertisers have entered
the media market in just
one year
Video game maker Activision Blizzard Inc has said it will buy “Candy Crush Saga” creator King Digital Entertainment for $5.9 billion to strengthen its games portfolio. Activision, which owns popu-lar game franchises such as “World of Warcraft,” “Call of Duty” and “Diablo,” will pay $18 in cash per King share, a premium of 16 percent to King’s closing price. The addition of King’s highly-com-plementary business will position it as a global leader in interactive entertain-ment across mobile, console and PC plat-
forms, Activision said. “With a combined global network of more than half a bil-lion monthly active users, our potential to reach audiences around the world on the device of their choosing enables us to deliver great games to even bigger audi-ences than ever before,” said Activision Blizzard Chief Executive Bobby Kotick. Video game publishers are shifting to the lucrative digital business from physical sales of games as consumers shift from consoles to playing on smartphones and tablets. King, which makes games for so-
cial media platforms and mobile devices, will continue to be led as an independ-ent operating unit by Chief Executive Riccardo Zacconi, Chief Creative Officer Sebastian Knutsson, and Chief Operating Officer Stephane Kurgan, the companies said in a statement. King, which went public last March, has been struggling to boost bookings, an indicator of fu-ture revenue, as new game launches are planned only toward the second half of the year.
(Source: businessinsider.in)
Activision Blizzard buys Candy Crush franchise
Six things that are wrong with the current state of Influencer Marketing Programs and how
they can be resolved. By Shephali Bhatt
INFLUENCER SINFLUENCER
#Protip To Resolve ThisMarketer, choose wisely. Use well: “Some clients are happier with far more meaningful KPIs than mere trending,” says Nagarajan. They motivate their agencies to bring on board infl uencers who’re able to change perceptions, who the users take seriously. In fact, the best ones are those who really don’t prescribe anything to their followers but give them information, says Xolo’s Raina. Information that users won’t get through the company’s advertising because of its time, space and cost limitation.
Infl uencers, stop spamming: There’s such a thing as muting people on Twitter without unfollowing them. Not to mention the long sheet of blacklisted users that agencies have started maintaining now. If you’re going to inundate user timelines with *buy this product because I said so because they paid me to do so but you don’t know that*, they’ll fi gure it out. Most people are not dumb, you know.
Agencies, start providing measurement metrics: Nagarajan’s team at GroupM is continuously working on evolving various tools to identify the right kind of infl uencers for brands among other things. Khanna’s team is creating tools to detect abnormal follower growth on Twitter and duplicate content. There’s scope for much more — like fi nding out the number of clicks generated from the url embedded in an infl uencer’s tweets. “The good news is it’s possible to create great value out of an infl uencer marketing program,” Nagarajan says. Now to make that happen.
French communication company Havas’ just launched ‘Meaningful Brands’ study deep-dives into the connect between quality of life and well-being with brands. BE gets an exclusive peep
How meaningful is your brand?
Hyundai Bot Activity: Where hired (or volunteering) bots kept tweeting random tweets with the #i20Active hashtag just so it gained volume and started trending
Blacklist material: Through their Twitter Audit, Eleve Media found out an inexplicable spike in Nivedith’s follower count
ANIRBAN BORA
Highest Brand Attachment in India
86%Indians would CARE if
LIC disappeared tomorrow
INDIA FindingsIndians believe most strongly
that BRANDS SHOULD PLAY A
ROLE inimproving our quality of
life and welL being
Indians believe most strongly
that BRANDS ARE WORKING
HARD at improving our quality of
life and wellbeing
APAC
APAC
India
India
Global
Global
69%
55%
75%
76%
67%
38%
GLOBAL 1 Samsung
2 Google 3 Nestlé 4 Bimbo 5 Sony 6 Microsoft 7 Nivea 8 Visa 9 ikea 10 Intel
INDIA 1 Amul
2 Cadbury 3 Google 4 Brittannia 5 LIC 6 Microsoft 7 Intel 8 HP 9 Parle 10 Samsung
Ranking:
Methodology: Meaningful Brands is a study undertaken by Havas globally to show how quality of life and wellbeing connects with brands at both human and business level. It tracks 1,000 brands, 300,000 people, 34 countries and across 12 industries. In APAC the study covered 305 brands, 60130 people across 7 markets, and in India leg, it has covered 100 brands, 13000 people, 11 sectors, across the country. The research covers all aspects of people’s lives, including the impact on the collective wellbeing (the role brands play in communities and the communities that people care about), in personal wellbeing (self-esteem, healthy lifestyles, connectivity with friends and family, making people’s lives easier, fi tness and happiness) and marketplace factors, which relate to product performance such as quality and price.
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AMIT BAPNA
Anita Nayyar, CEO, Havas Media India & South Asia, shares some unique nuances
of the study in Indian context and its significance for the brands
The Indian Consumer: One Of A KindIndia is the most grateful coun-try because people here care for brands that make a difference to their lives. Here the level of perceived meaningfulness from brands is the highest. Indian con-sumers don’t see brands as pure functional products but as pro-viders of personal and collective wellbeing. This perception has a tremendous impact as in a compet-
itive scenario the f ight for market share is really the fight for consumer m i nd spac e. M e a n i n g f u l brands are re-warded by con-sumer loyalty and increased share of wal-let. Getting a c u st omer t o buy-in and care if a brand dis-appears is no mean task in a
brand world of low switching costs. It translates to long term brand survival and truly – brand equity.
Every Global CEO’s Dream-market Indian’s are by nature more emo-tional, caring and more believing. The Indian DNA is that of trust and attachment. We are an emerging economy — here brands are not completely commoditised and peo-ple have high expectations from them. There is high incidence of success of our local brands which gets reflected through high con-sumption. The Indian consumer is a dream consumer and does jus-tice to meaningful brands. Given these traits of Indian consumers, every global brand and CEO is at the doorstep of India.
Give Me My Daily BreadAmul has emerged as the most meaningful brand. In India, ‘Food’ is one of the most meaning-ful sectors, attaining strong at-tachment and trust. Food brands are especially meaningful for making daily lives better with their rational benefits of savings, convenience, health and better nu-tritional habits. Local brands like Amul take the lead with multina-tional corporations like Cadbury who introduce local brands to resonate with consumer context and tastes, locally.
Anita Nayyar
THE ECONOMIC TIMES NOVEMBER 11-17, 2015 2
Product: ETNEWMumbaiBS PubDate: 11-11-2015 Zone: BrandEquity Edition: 1 Page: BEPER1 User: sandeepd0203 Time: 11-05-2015 23:19 Color: CMYK
SHEPHALI BHATT
From the looks of it, these are not very good times for startups, especially the Series A-Series B variety. Stern e-mails from founders, massive layoffs,
temporary shutdown of operations — they’ve seen it all in less than a fortnight. Yet, none of this stops these players from advertising — something to offset all the bad press perhaps? Interestingly, advertising for startups — that was presumably the forte of traditional agen-cies — is slowly being taken over by new kinds of players.
There’s All India Bakchod or AIB’s adver-tising unit Vigyapanti that’s recently done a video for dating app TrulyMadly (whose creative duties are otherwise handled by Contract). Online furniture seller Urban Ladder (who’s had Lowe as its creative part-ner on several projects) recently rolled out a long-form video created by Boring Brands — an agency that claims to be a campaign en-abler for startups. Are these newfound start-up specialists a threat to traditional agencies scrambling for business in these times of re-ducing margins? Yes and No. Here’s how:
Suitors’ advantage over traditional agencies1) Quick turnaround time: If you’ve got a mes-sage you want to deliver quickly, you go the likes of Boring Brands, says Navin Parwal, creative lead at Urban Ladder. “They’re small teams, execution is faster and it takes less time to go online,” he adds. 2) Reverse Pitch: Boring Brands is currently reviewing requests from 17 Series A/B start-ups, says their co-founder Anshul Sushil. Tanmay Bhat, the self important creative officer of Vigyapanti (yes, that’s his designa-tion), is planning to organise a day where the shortlisted startups from the 1000 who’ve ap-proached him, can present a pitch to him and his team — so it’s easier for them to pick the best product and people to work for. “It’s prob-ably the first time an agency will be calling for a pitch,” he quips. While there are traditional agencies who’ve turned down a lot of startups on account of failure of payment, nobody can
claim to be in a reverse pitch position such as theirs so far.
Why traditional agencies need not worry1) Experience matters (still): That the new out-fits have a better understanding of the startup culture and therefore are better equipped to handle them is an argument we are not ready to buy. We have the case study of Flipkart built over the years by a traditional indie — Happy Creative Services. That explains why a Zomato — that would earlier boast of its in-house creative prowess — chose to rope in Ogilvy for a new set of TVCs set to roll out this month. “The ads are stories about people who use our product and the simple things that connects them together, so we took a call and went with a traditional agency that has
executed similar campaigns in the past,” says Pramod Rao, SVP - growth at Zomato. 2) Scale weds Scale: TrulyMadly had ini-tially signed digital agency iContract but soon shifted to their mainline counterpart Contract when it required a change in core
brand communica-tion. “There was an i n t e r n a l c o n f l i c t around that time,” re-calls Sachin Bhatia, CEO and co-founder of the dating app. Even Urban Ladder’s more established competi-tor FabFurnish relies on mainline agencies for brand imagery. All their social and digi-
tal duties are handled in-house otherwise. “We’ve realised over the last few years of evaluation that this model works best for us,” says Ankita Dabas, their new co-founder.
Boring Brands v/s AIB Vigyapanti According to Urban Ladder’s Parwal, Boring Brands understands the startup scenario re-ally well. No surprises then that the agency’s co-founder boasts of being in the game “since the time Bhavish (Aggarwal) of Olacabs was a nobody.” But they aren’t the only ones popular with the investor’s body anymore. AIB’s Bhat tells us he’s being approached by VCs as well. As for TrulyMadly’s Bhatia, both of them are content creators. Choosing between the two is going to be a matter of ‘salt to taste’ perhaps.
So who will win this Startup Swayamvar?(The startup client being the bride, of course)
The clients seem to unanimously root for collaboration. “You should work with multiple partners till you become a Coca-Cola,” says Bhatia. You choose a partner depending on the story you want to tell, adds Zomato’s Rao. Even L&K Saatchi & Saatchi’s CEO Anil Nair says it’s not a matter of ‘And-Or’ but ‘And & And’. The non-traditional suitors do intend to become full-fledged creative partners and not just startups’ content suppliers though.
Since the concept of a Draupadi is not largely welcomed anymore (thank God?), till the time AIBs and BoringBrands of the world prove the agencies and clients wrong, we’re going with the status of ‘Open Relationship’ on this account.
Imagine a world where you can, even as you stare idly at your bowl of cereal at break-fast, use your smartphone to slip right into it, racing across hills, virtually eating ce-
real a la Pac Man (or Ms Pac Man if you’d prefer), gaining brownie points that translate into a few months worth of free cereal supply. Impossible, you say? We’d like to quote the Queen in Alice in Wonderland who claimed to have believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast and ask you to consider the possibilities represented by augmented reality.
Blippar, the advertising vehicle that enables brands to bring products to life through its app, is slowly revolutionising the way consum-ers interact with brands — all through the power of image recognition and aug-mented reality technologies. Gone are the days when marketers were obsessed with QR codes; brands are now jumping upon the augmented reality bandwagon by the dozen. Blippar which was launched in London in 2011 by Ambarish Mitra, Omar Tayeb, Jess Butcher and Steve Spencer has spread across the globe but only reached India towards end 2014. The augmented reality ad platform which received 45 million dollars funding this year from Qualcomm Ventures and private funders, most recently launched a vir-tual reality app aimed at kids. Its prod-uct referred to as Cardio VR for Google Cardboard aims at helping children learn about the human body through virtual reality. But long before children entered the picture, Blippar was gauging the global consumer market.BE talks to Arnav Ghosh, Blippar India
CEO to get an idea about the Indian con-sumer market’s interaction with augment-ed reality.
Why did it take this long for Blippar to come to India?AG: The commercial launch of Blippar in 2011 was a work in progress. From an engineering point of view it was still being vetted by investors in the UK and the US. However, we gradually expanded globally all the way from San Francisco to Delhi, Tokyo, Istanbul, Amsterdam and so on, around 150 countries. Globally, we have seen close to 50 million downloads of the app. Blippar is only getting bigger. We needed to be sure before entering India, we were
just being cautious.
What kind of clientele do you cater to in India? How ac-
tive are Indian users on the app?AG: We have around 30 clients and have seen over 500,000 downloads. We have a diverse list of clients from Wipro, our first client to Hero Honda, Kelloggs, Tropicana, IBM, Amar Chitra Katha and so on. The most interesting and successful campaign we did was for Tinkle, the challenge was to engage children in conversation using technology without driving them away from the books. It was the first comic book that we made printable, using the parents as influencers. Education as a vertical is immensely profitable for both the creators and the users. So far, we have seen close to 1,50,000 active users in the country. Our engagement has not been massive but
qualitatively good in India. We take some time in explaining to the brand that it’s not about creating a website. For instance, how often do you log into the Coca-Cola website? Never. It’s about creating differentiated content. If the brand comes and tells us to do a campaign where when the consumer ‘blips’ a product they see a video through the application, then we’re going to walk away from that idea. Might as well get on YouTube if you want to view a video. Blippar is a content discovery app. Every time you ‘blip’ a Pepsi can in Turkey, dif-ferent content shows up, ranging from interactive games to contests.
How do you get consumers to talk about their experiences on social media?AG: Games and contests are an ideal way to get consumers talking. Especially games always attract the larger crème of the smart phone au-dience. We are a 90% transactional digital economy therefore if we’re doing a contest or a sweepstake it always works. Usually, it’s the 18-30
years age group that is active. There are two funda-mental things — any brand manager will have two budgets, one for digital and one for traditional me-dia. By improving upon image recognition technol-ogies, we can get the consumer to interact with liter-ally any object, ensuring that brand managers are also keen to spend on digital media, as long as they see returns. If the consumer points their phone at a chocolate, ball, bat or food item and are instantly engaged in an activity, they are more likely to tweet about it, rather than getting on Facebook, liking the brand page, participating in a contest and then consuming the product.
Recently, it was mentioned Blippar would nev-er sell to a Google or Microsoft. Any particular reason behind that? AG: We won’t ever sell. We would rather become the next Microsoft or Google, than sell. We have hired people from Microsoft, Google and Yahoo. The mo-ment you give it away that vision is compromised. Our mission is to create a visual search platform. Consumers complain that they don’t have enough objects to ‘blip’. Currently we recognise objects like apple, banana, Bollywood movies from 2010 to 2014, we are adding on more categories like cars and magazines. Our object recognition technologies are in the beta phase. Our aim is to recognise 20% of the world by the next 5 years.
Having ruled the roost with Pulsars in the premium end of the market, Pune based Bajaj Auto has un-leashed a range of cruiser bikes under Avenger to
woo Indian masses. With Royal Enfield and Harley Davidson finding traction in the mid-size and high end motorcycle space, there was a vacuum in the afford-able cruiser space, which Bajaj Auto has filled now with the Avenger 220 Cruise, 220 Street and the 150 Avenger Street at ̀ 84,000 and `75,000 respectively. “The strategy behind the new range of Avenger is born out of the approach of creating something which is opposite of the market place,” says Rajiv Bajaj, the MD of Bajaj Auto. Currently the sales of all brands less than 200cc account for around 8 lakh units per month. And around 40% of two wheelers are upgraders from earlier bikes.
“When everybody is presenting one for-mat of bike to the market, we are presenting something different, so suddenly we be-come the only player available there. And probably, people who are jaded and fatigued buying the same thing, Pulsar, FZ, Apache, etc, will hopefully get something new and exciting in the market,” he explains.
In its third avatar, the new range of Avengers are built on Bajaj Auto’s new gen-eration platforms, which underpins the new Pulsars and KTM, and are high on per-formance and drive feel.
Bajaj felt the existing Avenger only ap-pealed to a specific audience and was a not a sharp cruiser, but part-cruiser, part-street with just one cubic capacity which was 220. So the company decided to introduce a range at different price points and different cubic capacities.
“If we want to use Avenger and create a larger appeal, we must do three things. In terms of pricing — we will have more price points, because everybody can’t af-ford to buy an Avenger 220 and a big cc bike. Secondly, we must have different styles, as different people want different things. And we must offer more than one cubic capacity because if somebody wants a higher or low-er capacity, the option is available,” he says.
R L R av ic h a n d r a n , c h a i r m a n , Choosemybike.in and a two-wheeler indus-try veteran says there is no competition and for Bajaj it is a good opportunity to grow this portfolio. “If they succeed, they net all the catch in the segment and with an early lead. But there are some limitations posed by the category itself in its true definition and they
know it well enough.”This attempt is likely to create the desire
among various commuting bikers to shift to the leisure riding cruiser at an affordable price point with adequate power and fuel efficiency, says Ravichandran.
Avenger’s “Feel Like God” positioning has the potential to connect with the youth who prefer lighter and less expensive but fun-to-ride bikes. This is the segment that Bajaj would almost like to create by offering a de-
cent mix of models/features/price points backed with appropriate branding/imag-ery says PS Sunder, a senior professional-turned-entrepreneur who earlier worked in senior positions with two-wheeler ma-jors in India.
Bajaj expects the new range to potentially double or triple the Avenger family fran-chise to 10,000 to 15,000 units per month. And since they are built on the existing platforms, they are profitable too.
The company’s share in the premium end of market has gone up from 35% to 39% with the new Pulsars and Avenger will take it even further says Bajaj.
“Our share has come close to 40%, thanks to the new Pulsar and my own hope is that — with this segment being the 18% of the in-dustry or 1.6 lakh units — in an industry of 8lakh -8.5 lakh a month, if Avenger sales go up from 4,000 to 15,000 units, it will have an incremental gain of 11,000 units, which will be almost 7%-8% mar-ket share gain,” he adds.
Royal Enfield which continues to be a definitive choice says there is enough head-room to grow in the cruiser segment. This year (2015) the Thunderbird cruiser will clock sales of 40,000 units, four times
since 2012, says Rudratej ‘Rudy’ Singh, pres-ident of Royal Enfield. The Thunderbird with 350cc to 500cc is priced `1.35 lakh to `1.56 lakh.
Cruiser bikes should fulfil the need for long distance driving and normal com-mute. The cost of ownership and mainte-nance is important in this seg-ment says Singh of Royal Enfield. Now it remains for the Avenger to live up to its name and fight some of the world’s oldest cruisers at their own game.
Drive Hard With A Vengeance
BIAirbnb appears to have survived what could have been a
huge blow to its business in San Francisco.Proposition F,
a local ballot measure that was seen as a threat to Airbnb
in its hometown, has failed. Preliminary results show vot-
ers rejecting Prop F by a wide margin - more than 60%
against, and less than 40% in favor. The measure would
have curbed the number of days a host can rent on the
platform, capping it at 75, as reported by Business Insider’s
Biz Carson. The measure was largely seen as a threat to
Airbnb’s overall growth. (Source: businessinsider.com)
The Great Indian #Startup Swayamvar
‘Blip’ For More
Anil Nair(Representing Traditional Agencies)
Tanmay Bhat(Representing AIB’s Vigyapanti)
Commitment Phobic?
Content ( )Strategy(?)
Signature Style
In conversation with Blippar India CEO Arnav Ghosh. By Shashwati Shankar
Bajaj Avenger’s latest avatar
tries to give all the swagger of
a premium cruiser at a
substantially reduced price
tag. Will India’s wannabe Hell’s Angels bite? By
Lijee Philip & Ketan Thakkar
People who are jaded and fatigued buying the same thing will hopefully get something new and excitingRajiv Bajaj, MD, Bajaj Auto
lijee [email protected]
We won’t ever sell. We would rather become the next Microsoft or Google than sell. The moment you give it away the vision is compromised
Advertising for startups, presumably the forte of traditional agencies is being taken over
Funding or no funding, startups have a ‘series’ of options to choose their kind of communication partner. Different offerings or merely different packaging?
ANIRBAN BORA
GETTY
IMA
GES
There’s no substitute for committed people such as agency partners who want to see the brand’s business grow, who can talk about ‘what next’ along with ‘what now’. AIB can’t do sustained communication. They’ll be bored out of it after one-two videos.
AIB Vigyapanti is great with content. They’re good to give a brand booster shots. But what about brand strategy?
You saw an ad with a naked comedian. How many people would remember it was for FabAlley? They’re (AIB) only worried about their content. As Piyush Pandey says, “It’s not about getting your ad discussed but its concept.”
We’re actually not looking for a short-term gig at all. Our conversation is centered around building and scaling them up. We’re planning to pick equity share so we need to make sure their valuation goes up. They won’t throw equity our way just like that, you see.
Vigyapanti is made up of ex-ad professionals. If these guys can’t do brand strategy, it means your industry can’t do it either, no?
Since we’re doubly worried about our content, we also make sure the work is top quality. Brands benefit from associating with us. Ask Sachin of TrulyMadly about the spike in app downloads post the Qawwali video. All at 1/5th the price an agency would’ve charged them.
Face Off
Airbnb co-founder Brian Chesky
Airbnb dodges a bullet in its hometown
THE ECONOMIC TIMES NOVEMBER 11-17, 2015 3
‘‘You’re differ-ent. Instead of bolster-i n g y o u r uniqueness,
people will try to make you feel like you’re weird or damaged. I’m here to offer some well earned advice — Screw them.”
It isn’t uncommon to see simi-lar Facebook almost memes popping up on your newsfeed, enabling teenagers and mille-nials to assert their self worth in a digital age drowning in pseudo intellectual, quasi philosophical, pas-sive aggressive garbage.
These pearls of wisdom that are often accompanied by stock images of a lone woman’s silhouette walking on the beach are attributed to no one but anonymous Facebook page ad-ministrators who get kicks out of the million likes and shares each post gets. We humans are nothing but fragile creatures us-ing technology as an extension of our souls — the internet is our medium for uniting us with in-secure, like minded individuals that are sucked into an unpleas-ant clickbait of negative viral-ity. Brands ought to be envious
of the kind of traction ludicrous posts like, “Sweet as sugar, hard as ice. Hurt me once, I’ll kill you twice,” end up receiving. No, these administrators aren’t spending a million dollars or sitting throught strenous mar-keting strategy meetings but are simply tapping into the human psyche — poking people where it hurts most and letting them know they are not alone.
One can’t point out exactly when this phenomenon of the
Facebook almost memes, the Instagram quotes and the Tumblr posts began but chances are, it has been trending long
enough for you to be a silent ob-server or a secretly obsessed 3:00 am troller. The one aspect that became cool in recent times was being a geek, a nerd or a bit of a freak. It began with young men and women buying oversized glass frames that covered most of their faces in their profile pictures, while discussing an existential crisis in their lives — most likely a first world social problem revolving around the dearth of attractive, available sexual partners at the local pub or how music gigs these days
are just “too mainstream.” And then there are those who
are pretty much, anti every-thing. No, we aren’t referring to feminists. These are seemingly know-it-all individuals whose motto in life involves berat-ing your very existence on the basis of how promiscuous you are to what is on your plate for dinner. For instance pages like, “I’d rather be single than lied to, cheated on or disrespected,” or “If you aren’t veg-an, you aren’t cool.” Some of these pages have over a 100,000 l ikes, over 4 0,0 0 0 likes on each post and thousands of shares. Amidst the users that are wagging their fin-gers at the meat eaters and the cheaters, there exists the spiritual, bohemian wannabe that lives in a 1500 square foot high-rise apartment in Bandra but claims to be a tree hugging, free-spirited, forest dweller. The multi-coloured bra bandeaus, knee high boots, fringed bags, Aztec printed shirts or excessive Om printed pyjamas grace the bodies of these individuals who scream out their uniqueness in Facebook posts that preach one-ness. Spirit Science is one such “spiritually educational” plat-form that I jumped aboard a few years ago, posts like, “Society is funny. They ask you to be your-self, yet they judge you,” are in-dicative of a suite of pretentious,
new age hippies that frolick around at music festivals pre-tending they just walked out of a 1960’s Woodstock dream.
Truth be told, underneath the veil of this pseudo intel-lectual nonsense that fails to induce thought provoking dark Nietzschean philosophies or promote Jiddu Krishnamurthi’s ideas on the nature of meditation — there lies the fear of rejection. Gone are the times when witch-
es were burnt and nu-clear disasters were a common potential occurrence, we hu-mans fear nothing more than loneliness. There lies a light at the end of this tunnel, amidst the garbage, there are pages like Berlin artparasites, Brainpickings and i nd iv idu a l s l i ke
Nitesh Noor Mohanty, co-found-er of The Root, Jason Silva, founder of Shots of Awe that curate posts by integrating art and intellectually stimulating thoughts into each post. Each of them have a few hundred thousand, completely justified followers.
There might be a majority of wannabe millennial philosophi-cal intellectuals out there but if you sift through the quasi inspi-rational garbage, amongst the rags you’re bound to find a gem that’s worth sharing.
Are we spending our social media lives interacting with a bunch of wannabe philosophical intellectuals? By Shashwati Shankar
BAWDY COPY
Got any funny emails floating around your office or at home? Seen a scam in someone’s portfo-lio? Please send them to us at [email protected]’ll dish all the dirt you dish to us
Life Nahin Hai Laddoo
A leading global confectionary com-pany has been going through a fair bit of churn ever since it became a part of an American multina-tional confectionery, food and beverage conglomerate. The churn is not just limited to internal changes like realign-ment of portfolios and change of work-
styles which have been underway for a while now. Our moles tell us that before the year ends, there is likely to be a churn on its creative mandate as well which is currently split between a couple of agencies.The core confectionary business is unlikely to be affected, since the Asian business is pretty strongly aligned to the current partner, a creative giant in its own right. It’s the non-confectionary business and a specific brand of choco-late that is unique to India that could come under realignment scrutiny. As per our moles the beneficiary could well be this once independent agency that is now a part of a network which works with the marketer globally in many countries.
The Real InfluencerInfluencers come in all sizes, shapes and kinds. This one is about two friends of yore — one currently dabbling with a well-funded e-commerce player and the other a media-man of stature. Our moles tell us that
this man of resource managed to get his future employer the plum account of the ecommerce giant, because of an old tie that was reignited and put to good use. The loser in this case, was the media-man’s former employer, a giant global agency, which was obviously not happy about this newly revived friendship.
AN
IRB
AN
BO
RA
Rise of the Digital Intellectual
If you sift through the quasi inspiration-al garbage, you’re bound to find a gem
@myntra: E-Commerce is back on the brand index with Myntra’s #FestivitiesBeginAtMidnight campaign. As part of the cam-paign the fashion etailer ran a contest where winners could take
home coupons worth ̀ 8000 if they decoded the style in the pic-ture. The most RT’d tweet of the week was from this campaign and it asked users to RT the tweet to reveal the winner.
@ShaadiDotCom: The matrimony portal’s #FastForHer campaign was resurrected for another Karvachauth. The aim: to get men to fast for the long lives of their wives. The campaign saw a lot of male users getting involved to pledge their support for their wives and women in their lives and then share their karvachauthexperiences.
@Flipkart: The ecommerce major also ran a contest as part of its #FlipkartFestive -Homes cam-paign. The most retweeted tweet of this campaign asked people to follow Flipkart and RT the tweet to be eligible to win. Users were also asked to share a wishlist of
three products from their televi-sion, home and kitchen applianc-es and furniture sections. Users with the most interesting wishlists stand to win prizes.
@PayUmoney: The lead cam-paign for Pay U this Diwali was #FaydeKiDiwali which asked us-ers to share what they would do to have a “Fayde Ki Diwali”. There were prizes to be won for the best responses, which ranged from altruistic pledges to environmental friendly ones. The
brand was able to drive a lot of active engagement.
@UrbanLadder: Urban Ladder, tied up with with
Bajaj Finserv to offer EMI options and help people realise their wishes this Diwali. They asked people to share their diwali wishlist with the
#InstaDiwaliParty. Given that gifting and
shopping are both key conversation buckets
this time of the year - the brand saw a lot of conversations and engagements.
Source: Twitter
Twitter Festive Index
1 @Myntra 2 @shaadiDotCom3 @Flipkart4 @PayUMoney5 @UrbanLadder
BRAND ENGAGEMENT INDEX
The index looks at the live list of all advertisers on the platform and measures the total number of user engagements with all the Tweets that they sent out that week - specifically this is a sum of all the replies,
retweets and favourites across all tweets that week. The Festive Index looks at advertiser tweets that were on Festive Themes.
The weekly Twitter Advertiser Index lists the advertisers who’ve gener-ated most engagement with users on the platform
BRANDRANKS
As on 4th
November 2015
IMPRESSIONS OF ‘DIWALI’ ON
808Million
Shares Kunal Jeswani, CEO — Ogilvy Group, India Board Member in charge of Soho Square, “Tata Motors is embarking on a brand transformation journey and the core task (given) was to increase brand rel-evance amongst the under 35 consumer.” The digital leg of the campaign has been co-managed by DigitasLBi and Starcom Convonix through a gamut of initiatives. These include owned social (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram), paid social (all major platforms, including LinkedIn), display on all major publisher platforms (desktop and mobile), search, mobile spe-cific ads and ideas, online and offline blog-ger engagement, amongst others, shares Amaresh Godbole, managing director – India, DigitasLBi.
About the Messi association Delna Avari, head - marketing communication and services, passenger vehicle busi-ness unit, Tata Motors says, “The story is about the Tata Motors transformation and this is just one step in it. It’s about giving the brand a lift and it’s about staying the course – possibly the first time we’ve done something like this.” Being a Second gen-eration Tata employee she should know. (Her father was also an employee at Tata Motors and she started her career in the
commercial vehicles segment sell-ing trucks and other vehicles
in UP and Bihar.)It is indeed an unenviable
position to be in for any company: to be the largest automobile company in the country and yet in the
fast-growing and (the sexier) passenger car
segment, not be-ing seen as cool
enough. And that is also the core of the company’s biggest challenge – in a world getting increasingly younger in age and in mindset – the auto behemoth’s brands are not particularly scoring high in the con-sideration set.
She candidly admits that at a macro level it has meant an internal transformation journey that really started off in 2013, around pillars like the product pipeline, manufacturing, and customer experi-ence transformation. For each of these and many others, a deep-dive was done to decipher where the customer is headed and where is the company lagging. For in-stance, customer experience where Tata Motors has struggled with sales, after sales, and importantly, the dealer experi-ence. The dealership as a channel needed a refresh at multiple levels: from infra-structure point of view, from processes point of view, from capability point of view, even from the selling capability scope, she adds. It was equally about consolidating the brand portfolio and rationalising the marketing investments, that was some-thing of a crying need for the auto com-
pany. Continuing with its launch of Zest, Bolt and GenX Nano this year, Tata Motors has lined up an aggressive roll-out strat-egy and plans to launch two products every year right up to 2020.
Even as the company embarks on this re-invention journey, in a country where Bollywood and cricket occupy the maxi-mum mindspace, when it comes to any kind of endorsements, how much cut-though would a football association get and at what cost? Aditya Hitkari, CEO, Globosport Platinum Rye Entertainment, the agency that executed the much-talked about Micromax - Hugh Jackman endorse-ment last year feels that it may just work. “While the Hollywood celebrities and international athletes are expensive, the right association can be clutter breaking and refreshing in a space where Indian celebrities sign multiple brands and are over-used,” he says. It is a fact that ma-jority of the Indian celebrities today are multi-brand endorsers and rarely do they stand for anything unique. Darshana Bhalla, co-founder & CEO, Mates, a unit of Madison world, has a rider on the associa-
tion, “International celebrities will have the requisite traction amongst the aware in largely big cities (essentially metros). However outside that demographic the cost of acquisition of such celebs becomes very high because of lack of awareness.” As a part of the deal, the football icon is locked in with Tata Motors for two years, for now.
On choosing football and hence Messi,Pareek says, “We chose football becauseall our research and surveys prove thatfootball is the new ‘cool’ and the current generation connects better with football. Soccer has a huge following in India andLeo is a different league, making it the aptchoice for us”, he adds. Getting Messi on-board is not just a play in the Indian market but equally much for the company’s global footprint. The association ties him withthe brand’s aspirations, so when the auto-brand goes into Indonesia, or South Africa, or later on into Latin America the journey would be it that much easier.
For now Tata Motors is hoping that Messi’s superlative dribbling skills would hopefully create a rub-off and do the magic.
Diwali ads typically can’t get by with an emotional overdose either since, says TNS’s Gupta, “the cultural collective conscious is more precisely focused around seasonal ideas, like prosperity and positivity.” Finally, the ads that do the best authentically integrate Diwali. As Arun Iyer, chief creative officer, Lowe Lintas puts it, “It’s important to make an honest connection with the heart of the consumer. People will see through it when you are trying to just capitalise on the festival.”
I n t h e c a s e o f Tanishq, handled by Lowe Lintas, Iyer believes, the cam-paigns have done a great job of chroni-cling the mood of the country: from a film about a couple trying to economise, but eventually suc-cumbing to the lure of festive jewellery to the mother-son film which pointed out the ticket size of the purchase matters less than the thought behind it. Do Diye Zyada, a Diwali film for Coke from a few years ago was inspired according to Prasoon Joshi, chairman – Asia Pacific, McCann Worldgroup, by a talk-ing head on a TV channel recom-mending Indians not celebrate Diwali given the extent of want and deprivation in the country. He says, “I felt can we instead think about sharing the celebra-tion? Extend your light to some-one else’s life and house. Instead of cutting back, why not light do diye zyada? Rather than becom-ing sad, share happiness. Which ties in with Coke’s message.”
Cadbury brands have moved from using the fest as a backdrop to finding a role the brand can play. Peres says, “As festivals get more rushed, relationships can sometimes be forgotten. The role of the brand is to ignite interac-tions that people would like to have.” It extends to activation: for instance, vans with Cadbury’s were sent to the defence forces last year. This year, Cadbury’s intends conveying best wishes to people who don’t get Diwali off like doctors and policemen.
And yet, given the universe of brands relatively few dabble with Diwali or do so in a creative, convincing manner. Peres believes it’s because companies often struggle to jus-tify the investment. In the case of Mondelez though, “We are in a sweet spot — pun in-tended — where we use both what the festival stands for and have a genuine sales opportu-
nity.” McCann’s Joshi believes, “Though a lot of good work was done in past, there’s still scope to do something more insightful and culturally relevant. Diwali is about Lakshmi or prosper-ity coming in and poverty going out. I don’t think many brands have managed to venture there.” Maybe next year will bring more than the regular tropes of family reunions, hugs and people smil-ing through tears. Perhaps even our own equivalent of the Coca-Cola ad that gave Santa Claus his globally recognised suit. After all, there’s no time like the pres-ent to dream big. [email protected]
Continued from Page 1 >> Continued from Page 1 >>
How Do You... Will Messi Help...
Given the universe of brands relatively few dabble with Diwali or do so in a creative, convincing manner
Driving Mr Messi Pulling off a shoot in a little less time than three games of footie
“We have only four hours to shoot with Messi!” had been echoing in Tata Motors con-ference rooms for months before the actual day of the shoot, chorus the two Soho Square ECDs Anuraag Khandelwal and Satish deSa, when asked about what went into shooting in a foreign land (Barcelona), with a global celebrity (Lionel Messi) who knew scant English and whose time was rationed in Euros. The 4 hours of Messi’s time in front of the camera had to be de-ployed to shoot multiple films, content for digital / social me-dia, an AR (augmented reality) activation, in-showroom expe-riences, print, outdoor, the making-of videos etc. All in all, we had to produce enough material for the campaign to last for six months across media, in a 4 hour shoot says Khandelwal. The production had to be executed with military precision. A day prior to the shoot, the entire team went through a full 4 hour rehearsal with the producer, director and photographers. On D-day, every shot was boarded up and ticked off as the production progressed like clockwork. The team shot across
three studios with a four camera set up for the film, plus two photographers and an additional videographer for all other content, shares deSa. There were rehearsals done with a body double the previous day to do an exact minute by minute track, for each shot of the film. Everything was accounted for, including his soundbytes, keep-ing in mind that he would need translations. It was like a shuttle launch, where the planning was as complicated and long drawn-out as the lift-off.
We chose football because all our research and surveys prove that football is the new ‘cool’ and the current generation connects better with footballMayank Parekh, President - PV, Tata Motors
“INCORRECTLY ATTRIBUTED QUOTES ARE A POOR
SUBSTITUTE FOR A LIFE WELL LIVED”
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