A few weeks back MyPopkorn ran a competition for creating print/TV commercials for 3 brands: Virgin mobiles, Sprite and Uniquely Singapore. They claimed that they had a respected panel of judges, promised huge monetary/non-monetary rewards for winners and actually showed a ray of hope to many budding copywriters and ad-makers. The competition received a huge response, around 3000 entries and then, simply vanished without a trace. The creative awards page on MyPopkorn now doesn’t exist. Google doesn’t show any result about who won this, or whether even the judgment actually took place. Now I doubt if this all was just a scam to promote their website and attract some free traffic/free publicity for their site.
Anyways, here is what I created for Virgin mobile handset ads. Please give your opinion in the comments.
He wears specs, and still he won a gold medal in shooting. I just wonder what kind of specs they are. Don’t you?
Abhinav Bindra, after his splendid performance in China Olympics 2008, became a well known face in every urban Indian home (not to say that he is unknown to the rural people, but this post is primarily concerned with him being known to middle/upper-middle class). People thought that companies will be queued up at his house for endorsement deals and he’ll soon be relieving our cricketers of their extra work because of which they sometimes don’t get time even for the game that made them famous. Though that quite didn’t happen, he cracked only one deal with Samsung, to become their brand ambassador for LCD TVs. It’s another story that Samsung almost wasted him in a campaign whose meaning was not clear to most of the audience (see http://www.thump.in/taxonomy/term/166 and http://www.yaxislive.com/abhinav-bindra-samsung-lcd-tv-ad-is-unbeatable for details).
But here I want to bring up another point. When I saw Bindra’s photograph for the first time in newspapers, the first thing that came to my mind was, “Oh, he wears specs, and still he won a gold medal in shooting, wow!” and I’m sure this thought would have come to many people who saw him for the first time. This makes him an ideal candidate to endorse eyeglasses. Just imagine: a lens that is so precise, it can make you the best shooter in the world. This idea would click to many people. Here, unlike the Samsung LCD TV ad, the connection is very clear: a vision improvement tool and the result of the improved vision.
I am not sure why companies like Carl Zeiss, Essilor etc. are not approaching him. Though it’s not public how much Samsung paid him for its campaign, but considering that it was the only offer he got, he shouldn’t be too expensive. Another point worth noting is that these companies sell premium products to upper-middle sections of the society where his face has become very familiar (as discussed earlier), so he’d appeal to 100% of the target audience.
What do you think of this idea? Please cast your vote/comment to indicate.
