Between the Briefs

A few ads and campaigns in the past few weeks have been at the back of mind for different reasons. Some made me happy and some left me confused. See -

The Dairy Milk “Pehli Tareek” campaign, for instance, took the pay day celebration all out, asking people to make Dairy Milk a part of this celebration. Very retro-Bollywoodsy, very quirky, very singable, very fun. Intermixed with 5 second spots on TV and radio that were quick reminders of the fact that it was the first of the month, and other radio quizzes et al., the campaign pretty much drove home really well. I even swore to buy a bar of Dairy Milk when I recevied my pay, so I guess that makes this efective advertising. Incidentally, the song is from a Kishore Kumar movie by the same name. Try and watch the entire campaign if you can.

And then Idea came up with a new “What an idea, Sir ji” ad with the “Walk When You Talk” approach. Not particularly ingenious, but sure to have struck a cord with the people.

Buuuuuuut, you’ve got to have some bad advertising, and so we did. Tata unveiled its new offering Tata Docomo after a fair amount of work spent on teasers. The teasers weren’t what you would call “teasing” enough. Just some random geometric shapes with some random questions. Very not-interesting. Like this:

One of the Tata Docomo teasers

So after all the teasing, on Friday – July 10, 2009 it finally happened. While we waited with bated breath, the brand was finally revealed. This only after some more teasing. Like, first the first page of your newspaper had some more arbit shapes and questions interrupting your reading and then on the last page, you had a full page ad going “Ta da!”. Like this:

The first page of the ToI on 10-07-2009

The Tata Docomo revelation

Now although I must admit I sort of liked how the shapes now made some sense and looked nice as “Docomo”, there was nothing else about it that I liked or made sense to me. For instance, the whole campaign is harping on some one second pulse USP.  Which is fine. But the whole “1 second can change your life” approach is so predictable and so out there. So if you are going to tell me something so preposterous, say it well. The copy elevated telecommunications to a lesson in how to make life-altering decisions, while the text is super big font is somehow reminiscent of “Do the Dew” (hmmm… I wonder why).

And it didn’t stop there. Radio One has this annoying (like, I started hating advertising kind of annoying) ad. I can’t find the ad anywhere but this is kind of what it was. First, for three minutes or more this played.

Click image to play

Now anything over 60 seconds is too much for a radio ad, so when it went on and on and on (and that was it… just that weird tooting sound), I initially thought there was some glitch with the radio station. But then, the tooting was replaced with a quick ad about how one second can change your life and so you should switch to Tata Docomo. At this point, I must mention that one of the examples of how one second can change your life was the background sound of a baby crying and some man becoming a dad. Seriously? One second? Try telling that to the woman who carried that thing around for nine months in a perpetual state of bloatedness and spent who knows how many hours in labor.

So anyway, after a few more ridiculous examples about 1 second instances, the tooting started again. Three minutes and then regular RJ comes on to speak. Bliss. Then RJ decides she’ll call some birthday fellow. So when she calls him, the tooting starts again – as the ringtone. I swear… if there ever were a moment when I agreed with people who said advertising sucks ass, it was now. (By the way, the ringtone was composed by Ram Sampath)

And what hurts more is that is a reasonably decent client, Docomo is a telecom giant in Japan, from the looks of it the budgets were good, telecommunications can be a fun account and what they’ve got to offer is not so bad. And I have a feeling the “Don’t pay for what you don’t use” proposition could’ve been used much better! Check this tool they’ve got on their site for starters. While I think it could have been more interactive (by actually letting people key in their conversation), what Tata Docomo is offering makes a lot of sense.

Now we move to their Twitter page. See, now this would be a good time to use the freakin’ shapes on the background and personalise it! But do they do it? No! Now it’s a blank orange. While it’s not such a bad attempt at keeping the conversation going, a few desperate tweets about “Spread the word” are a little tasteless.

I suppose the saving grace is the site itself, which is young, easy to get through and has some engaging pieces (but not much). But it’s still way off from actually saving the whole campaign.

I just hope Draft FCB + Ulka does something better for this client in the days to come. I really do.