Virgin Mobile ad concept July 9, 2009
Posted by प्रवीण in Advertising.Tags: ad concept, ad idea, advertisement, Advertising, creative awards, creativity, handset, mobile, mypopkorn, think hatke, virgin, virgin mobile
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My ad concept for Virgin mobile handsets.
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.
DELL: Take Your Own Path? January 20, 2009
Posted by प्रवीण in Advertising.Tags: Advertising, Dell, Take Your Own Path, computer, laptop, Enfatico
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Some interesting things about Dell’s recent campaign “Take Your Own Path” that itself did not take its own path.
Dell started its first ever campaign in India to attract SMB owners with a tag line: Take Your Own Path. It uses real life SMB owners to endorse Dell products and here these ‘real life heroes’ talk about how Dell transformed their business.
This campaign is a change from traditional celebrity endorsements by its competitors like Lenovo and Acer. SMB owners will definitely have more impact than celebrities (I’m not sure if Saif can tell the difference between an AMD and an Intel, and I’m not sure if Hritik even owns an Acer, so I will naturally trust P. Rejendren and Raman Roy more than Hritik and Saif), but here, rather than the whole campaign and it impact, I want to discuss its tag line – Take Your Own Path:
- I am quite amused at the irony of this ad which asks me to take my own path by pointing me towards the path chosen by some other business people. If they chose Dell, why should I as well? Am not I supposed to “take my own path” and trust my own judgment rather than theirs?
- The strategy of using ‘real life heroes’ is a very old one. Some time back HP also ran a campaign featuring Dilip Chhabaria, Karan Johar etc. highlighting how HP helped them succeed. Apple’s “Think Different” campaign was also on the same lines. So my question is: When the ad agency itself could not “take its own path” and come up with something new to advertise its product, how can it expect me to take my own path?
It looks like Enfatico, the ad agency created to handle only Dell’s marketing service, and much criticized (ridiculed rather) for not coming up with anything creative in 9 months even after guzzling $4.5 Billion, was under immense pressure to do something, anything.
And that’s what they did.
Neo Sports bleeding toe cricket ad December 16, 2008
Posted by प्रवीण in Advertising, Uncategorized.Tags: Advertising, bleeding toe, cricket, neo sports, nimbus
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Neo Sports, a cricket channel too famous for glamorizing violence in its cricket ads was airing the crushed toe ads for the India vs Australia 2008 October/November Test series.
Neo Sports ad
This ad is gross and negetive at so many levels:
- An injured, bleeding toe is not a very pleasant sight. At best it will give you some nightmares. So most people, after seeing this ad for the first time, will try to throw this image out of their minds and next time onwards avoid looking at this ad, which defeats the whole purpose of advertising.
- Now coming to the caption, Neo Sports does admit that last year Aussies not only bashed us in the game, they literally ‘beat us to ground’. Not a very sweet memory to bring back to the average Indian cricket fan, for whom this ad is made.
- Finally the last portion says: “It’s time to return the favour”. So what the ad assumes and spreads is, “Cricket is a game much like kick-boxing where the victory or superiority is not decided by the number of runs or wickets, but by the number of injured legs, fractured hands and broken skulls”. Obviously, gone are the days when cricket was called a “gentleman’s game”!
Nimbus Communications, the company behind Neo Sports, should have considered these points when approving this ad, but looking at the past record of Nimbus, when they released similar negative ads for India-West Indies and India-Sri Lanka series, it appears that they are consciously doing it.
