Advertising Opinions

Sometime in the middle of this year (2015) Lloyd Electric and Engineering Ltd. introduced their brand of washing machines as India’s first “Unisex Washing Machine”. Why and how is Lloyd Washing Machine unisex? Well, that is the positioning platform they took to differentiate their product from those of the competitors. The campaign is based on the insight, as reported in the media, that most men do not like to do household chores such as washing clothes which they leave to women to attend to, since the general belief or attitude is that it is the woman’s work. The other reason why women end up operating the washing machine is because men find it rather daunting to operate a washing machines. So Lloyd brings a washing machine which uses “UVtron Technology” to kill germs, “Inverter Technology” and is simple to operate — “so easy that sir can do the washing” as the ad says (the ad is embedded at the end of this article). Since Lloyd Washing Machine is so easy to operate even the man of th...

From the time Pepsi was introduced in India, as far as I can remember, their TV commercials have always featured celebrities. The very first TVC had singer Remo Fernandes and the ads which were released in the later years featured film and sports personalities. After seeing Pepsi advertising dominated by celebrities for years this new ad campaign comes as a refreshing change – there are no celebrities here but what we see are ordinary people; the ad features young men and women who happen to be Pepsi’s core target audience. The ad shows college students protesting and threatening to go on an indefinite hunger strike until their demands are met; one of the agitating students notices a bottle of Pepsi which he finds irresistible, he grabs the Pepsi bottle and drinks, thus causing great disappointment to his fellow agitating students, the Pepsi drinker reacts by coolly saying ‘Pepsi thi yaar, pi gaya’ and looks around with ‘I-drank-Pepsi-so-what-is-the-fuss-all-about?’ expression. View t...

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...