Advertising Opinions

Every year during the festival time in India, we are bombarded with special ad campaigns mainly in newspapers, TV and the internet. Most of these ads announce discounts and special offers for various products. These campaigns reach a peak during Diwali. Currently Pepperfry.com, a leading online furniture marketer, is running a pre-Diwali (2015) ad campaign – Why wait for Diwali sale? For high value products such as furniture most customers prefer postponing purchases till the time festival discounts are announced, the purpose of this campaign is to persuade customers to buy furniture, offered by Pepperfry at a discount, before stiff competition sets in during or just before Diwali. This clearly is a clever marketing move but what interested me were the scripts and the execution of the four interesting TV commercials(TVC) which comprise this campaign. You can watch the commercials at the end of this article below. All the four ads are based on true life situations which we all experien...

Greenply has recently launched a new advertising campaign – Ask Greenply. The campaign comprises three ads – 'Nayi Maa', 'Dhongi Baba' and 'The Couple' . In each of the ads an awkward situation is shown and when a character is asked a question he gets dumbfounded. The ads are humorous and the primary objective of this campaign is to urge consumers to ask questions on plywood, in order to enable this a website (www.askgreenply.com) and helpline number appear at the end of each ad. There is no need for me to describe these ads in detail since I have embedded them below at the end of this article. Over the decades plywood manufacturers have promised strength and durability as product benefits for their brands of plywood. Regardless who the manufacturer is or what brand it is advertising the message has always been about strength and durability; this has been happening for decades even till today. In this product category there is hardly any product differentiatio...

Faasos (earlier Faaso's) has been in the market for four or five years and has been expanding despite growing competition. The competition is just not from food brands in this category but also from other fast food or convenience food brands, both Indian and foreign, which are present in the market today; those being, various brands of pizzas, kabaab rolls, savouries, biriyanis and other such food items. Convenience food items of various kinds sold by local players, who do not have a presence in cities and towns other than where they are situated, also pose competition to Faasos; the convenience food market in India is becoming more and more competitive; the consumer today enjoys a lot of choice. Earlier Faaso’s was present only in Pune and Mumbai (Bombay) but today it has spread its wings to various other Indian cities such as, Delhi, Hyderabad, Bangalore, Ahmedabad, Baroda, Chennai, Indore and Gurgaon. Recently Faasos launched a mobile app to further grow its business, as is the...

The present IIN (Idea Internet Network) advertising campaign from Idea Cellular is generally believed to be gimmicky and misleading by many who have seen it; while I agree with that I also believe that it is among the most interesting ad campaigns I have seen in the past one year. It is quite evident that people have been misled into believing that IIN is some kind of an educational institution which is incorrect; IIN is simply about accessing the internet using Idea Cellular’s network. The IIN ad campaign comprises eleven ads (I do not know if there are more), to watch them please click here to go to Idea’s YouTube channel . As reported in the media this campaign is a follow - up to the ‘ No Ullu Banaoing ’ campaign. While ‘ No Ullu Banaoing ’ campaign educated users on using the mobile Idea’s internet services, the IIN ad campaign Idea Cellular takes it a step forward, the objective here is to empower users, especially the youth, of using internet to their advantage. The campaign is...