Tuesday, January 8, 2013

They came, we saw and everybody reviewed!

An Ad is a product of painstaking craftsmanship. Various elements, ranging from positioning of the product, clarity of the idea behind the product to visibility of the brand, its persona and the power of communication have to be intelligently weaved together. But while some Ads manage to rewrite preset creative benchmarks, some go the wrong way, fall by the side & fail to excite viewers. In this section, we review three Ads that came out tops, for the right and the wrong reasons this fortnight.

The axe defect [...YAWN...]

Advertiser: HUL
Baseline: Find VJ Jose
Agency: NA

4Ps B&M Take: When you are bringing in a series of ads that are supposed to create and build excitement around a product launch, the key idea is to keep the audience involved and eager to know what’s going to happen next. While the term “The Axe Effect” is worth its place in the league of iconic taglines, the current series of ads by Axe about MTV VJ Jose’s kidnapping seems to have run the mile and come off quite worse on our parameters. Yes, the series did start reasonably well, when it was reported in a newslike fashion that MTV VJ Jose had been kidnapped. With MTV too dedicating a page on its website titled ‘Save Jose’, most of the audience could have been forgiven for believing that the so-called kidnapping was actually real (it actually did look considerably real). Consider how the responses would have changed, when the next ad in the series claimed that VJ Jose had been kidnapped by a gang of women whose demands were not yet known. Subsequently, it was revealed that the attackers were demanding that Axe should launch its shower gel in India. At this point, the ad-series becomes quite predictably a been-there-seen-that bore. The ‘kidnappers’ release videos of Jose getting ‘tortured’ with food, paintball guns, a knife, et al (all videos end with the kidnappers bathing him with Axe Shower Gel); the Axe top brass is shown saying that launching the gel is dangerous for Indian men as it is known to evoke reactions in women that are bordering on the vicious and violent; Roadies’ host Rannvijay is shown convincing the top management to launch the gel. Yada, yada, yada... Axe obviously would get brand recall wherever its name is used; but levity, creativity, cinematography, are all quite dismal. One can’t wait for the series to get over. Literally.
 

Source : IIPM Editorial, 2012.
An Initiative of IIPM, Malay Chaudhuri
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