By Malay Desai
From: Taproot India & Contract Advertising
Mumbai’s entertainment supplement BT’s first ever commercial takes the music video route in claiming to be glamorous. The spot shows common city folks exaggeratedly styled up and going about their routines, with a soundtrack going ‘Style mara toh darna kya’. At the same time, the news portal Firstpost’s new spot focuses on a journalist’s travails in reporting news. After highlighting his hardships in getting a story published, it points a flaw in the print medium, that it delivers news ‘one day late’.
Do we Like
In a nation with cluttered media and a cross section of news consumers, big publishing houses must showcase themselves occasionally, to create/alter perceptions than to increase readership. Last week saw two new commercials in the same space selling starkly different mediums – print and online.
On The Times of India Mumbai’s cash cow Bombay Times turning 18, its guardians have announced its adulthood through a first ever TVC. It’s also a first when a supplement has been advertised as a separate entity, without any mention of its parent newspaper. And BCCL’s trusted lieutenants of late, Agnello Dias & co, have delivered the brief well.
BT already being perceived as a dogged follower of the rich and famous-to-be, this spot furthers the focus down to glamour, using comical hyperboles. The music video treatment is chic, and the soundtrack, a twisted version of Pyar kiya toh darna kya supports it well. The characters are all clichés – fisherwoman, cutting chai, dabbawala (yawn) etc. and the slow-mo makes the coolth come easy. But they only drive home the thought – that BT is unabashed, glamour-obsessed and unmindful of its critics (pick any edition and spot the paid content to know). They also remind us of SET’s ‘Deewana Bana De’ spot where an entire village got Big B haircuts. We also like the tiny, detailed city shots here, which Taproot mastered in its stellar Mumbai Mirror TVC.
Network18 portal Firstpost’s one-minuter is nearly opposite of the above, in subject and treatment. The focus is newspapers again, journalists rather, but the approach is condescending of the entire medium. Its classic B&W visuals are bound by a superb script, a prose that entails a day in the life of a reporter. The clincher is the climax, which comes after well-built up visual narrative. The question, ‘one day late?’ after a gritty tale of a journo’s efforts, is perfect for the product and furthers its debut TVC’s premise. This ad’s ambitious, in wishing the viewer would dump a newspaper for a website, but then every good ad is.
One thing’s certain, the changing times in both mediums of news (and non-news) is going to produce even more riveting advertising.
