Advertising Opinions

The other day I happened to see an advertisement for a property, it was featured on the jacket of The Times of India, Mumbai edition. It prominently showed a pizza delivery scooter, the box fitted on the scooter had “Express Packers and Movers” written on it, the ad continued overleaf. The advertiser was Nirmal Lifestyle; the ad was for, as they call it, “India’s First Fully Furnished Designer Homes”. The idea of showing a pizza delivery scooter was to convey that you need to carry very little with you when you shift to the new homes that Nirmal was providing. The ad was truly attention grabbing thanks to the high standard of creativity. Advertising for real estate has surely come a long way. In the good old days developers did not need to advertise their properties, they only had to rely on word-of-mouth and network of brokers. There was practically no effort on the developers’ side to sell as they do now because homes were always in heavy demand; there was virtually no competition.

When low cost airlines first started operations in India the main differences between these and existing airlines was that they cost less and did not serve food on board. The existing airlines were then given the tag of full service airlines to distinguish them from the low cost airlines. Over the years the number of low cost airlines increased, the full service airlines also joined the bandwagon by introducing low cost services of their own. However most of the advertising in this category was all about communicating the low fares and there seemed to be little effort in brand building. Today the need is to not just to distinguish low cost ones from the full service ones but to also distinguish and differentiate one low cost from the other, after all air passengers have got used to the low cost concept by now. What do air passengers expect? Punctuality, surely! This applies to all airlines, full service or low cost; Indigo Airlines in their current TV campaign have addressed the import

The Tata Docomo commercial for caller tunes which is currently on air definitely strikes a chord with its message “Suno Wahi Jo Sunna Chaho”. Docomo is a service provider, providing services similar to other service providers. It is up against the very, very, popular award winning Zoozoo campaign of Vodafone. Unlike some other service providers they do not have a celebrity to draw attention to their message. But personally I feel they better off without a celebrity. I found their concept extremely appealing, it immediately attracted my attention. The commercial shows a man interviewing a young man who is obviously a fresh graduate. The interviewer asks the young man, “Do you have any previous experience? Will you work on weekends? Are you a team player?” He gives a negative reply to all the questions and when he is asked “Do you have a goal?” He reacts, “Uhh”, almost as if he is thinking “Goal? What is that?” Surprisingly the interviewer smiles and says “you are hired” and the voice -