Between the Briefs

For quite sometime now, everyone’s been talking about reality television and how it’s taken over our lives. But the new set of campaigns for Dove got me thinking about reality advertising and how it’s so much more effective at getting people to listen and, well, be a part of it.

I suppose if we are speaking of Dove, the whole aspect of “reality advertising” is not exactly new. Dove has, for almost always now, harped on its “real beauty, real women” aspect in all of its communication. Its “Campaign for Beauty” has known its share of success by just making women feel good about themselves.

So sometime early in 2009, Dove in India brought in its classic “Half Face” challenge, asking women to share their experience in switching from soap to “one-quarter cleansing cream”.

A billboard asking women for half their face

Of course “real” women participated and got to feature on the TVCs, with a few teasers prior to the actual revelation showing the women fumbling as they delivered their shots. I don’t have the set of these commercials, so you’ll just have to make do with these:

Then there’s the Damage Care Expert set of commercials, also adapted from the US. Although the TVCs don’t offer much to write home about, I did like the copy on the print and outdoor advertising. Here’s one of them:

A Dove print ad

Following suit in the same category, Pears is asking for mom’s to send in photos of themselves with their kids to indicate the innocence & purity of the soap is like the mother-child relationship. Not half as effective in my opinion, at least from where I’m standing.

A Pears print ad

And I just haven’t been able to make any sense of the TVC that talks about Humayan and Babar and whatnot. Please let me know if you can:

At the other end of the spectrum is reality advertising that has tried to become a movement of sorts, while pushing the actual product somewhere in the background. After the whole noise Jaago Re raked up around the elections, it’s now back with the”Khilana bandh, pilana shuru” campaign. Even thought I really like the commercial, I don’t see it creating as much of a stir. Perhaps it’s because there’s only so much of it that people can take, these causes, or perhaps it hasn’t gone as all out as the previous campaign. Whatever the reason, I do hope it evolves further. ‘Cause I just don’t think taking a pledge online is going to be enough to do this.

But I suppose looking at the certain campaigns that have done well while adopting this “real” approach, you can only wait for more advertising that will do the same. Because it’s really just a win-win situation for everyone. The people forget that advertising is advertising as they finally want to believe what they hear, and for the advertiser, it quells the existential brouhaha that arises ever so often about why we do what we do and what good will come off of it.

This post is long over-due but theses TVCs were made available on YouTube only recently.

This is with reference to the new television campaign for Hindustan Times, which I found quite refreshing. Perhaps few campaigns for a media house managed to be as much an advertising landmark as the “Lead India ” campaign in recent years. This campaign, however,  is not on par with the “Lead India” campaign. You won’t find it all over the front page, third page, seventh page and back page of your newspaper, positioning itself as more important than the news itself (even though it probably was). And no… it won’t tug at your heart-strings 0r send you on a guilt-trip either. But what calls for a little humble appreciation is how it is quite simply to-the-point. Not surprising considering each spot is barely 20 seconds long.

Here are two of the TVCs:

There are a bunch of others, including one swine flu and one on cynicism. I have often been accused of being a little cynical myself but the ad still made perfect sense to me, without pissing me off. Which is quite honestly very difficult to do when you do venture into the space of public interest advertising with socio-political messaging.

But I guess Lowe Lintas has had enough practice in this sphere with its more-than-successful run with “Jaago Re” for Tata Tea and and also successful (though, not as much) “What an idea, Sir ji” campaign for Idea Cellular. Which is why I wasn’t surprised to know that they were the agency behind this campaign. Also appreciated its attempt at being “young” without stereotyping our kind with arbit, “cool” sounding messaging like, “It’s in my DNA” or whatever.

If there was something I had to change about the campaign, though, it would be the pay-off. Perhaps it’s just the cynic in me who’s talking, but somehow saying “It is time” in my mind always conjures the image of Rajnikanth saying it after blowing the smoke off his revolver. Or worse still, being said by one of those horrid rip-offs of him, as in “Quick Gun Murugun”.

But all in all, a very likeable campaign. I just hope it doesn’t go unnoticed.