By Malay Desai
From: McCann Erickson
Mr ‘Soundarya Premi’ is a man of taste, changing the small and big things of his retro age world to make them beautiful. Along with his assistant, he performs tasks such as changing architecture, telling village belles how to hold pots stylishly, making neat nests for birds, turning a hole in the wall to a portrait and more. Towards the end, the age switches to contemporary times where he is shown happy with the laminate furthering his desires of beauty in modern homes.
Do we Like
This fortnight, we spotted Taproot’s next big-budget task for Airtel, the ‘Jo tera hai woh mera’ campaign, which fell many shades below its ‘Har ek friend’ predecessor; we preferred biggie McCann’s latest work for Greenlam Laminates which instead raises the bar from its earlier spot for the same brand.
Laminates, plywood, adhesives et al are a tricky category. Apart from giving out seemingly boring details, they must get the end consumer to urge the buyer – i.e. the interior designer to go for it versus any other brand. One of the only options agencies have here is humour, and spearheaded by Fevicol from the past decade, this category has seen some intriguing work of late. We recall the outstanding Century Plywood spot where a sheet of wood becomes a makeshift bridge on a dug-up road.
‘Zamaane ko sajana hai’ is only the latest approach of this laminates brand (which by the way claims to be Asia’s biggest) that has seen hilarious spots in the past two years. It’s commendable how the humourous tone has been retained (doesn’t the brand’s mention itself warm up a funny bone?) over the past campaigns – which went from ‘Har koi poochega’ – a mobster falling in love with a home’s interiors to ‘Dil toh karega hi’ last year which showed an old man wanting to be laid to rest in a Greenlam coffin!
The striking features of this spot are the quirky character, a mustached ‘Beauty Man’ and the soundtrack which packs in Hindi and Reggae-English in unequal eccentricity. We noted this kingly (slightly gay in some ways) character across the campaign’s media, especially online, where its integration of YouTube-Facebook is a work of beauty.
Lastly, this is yet another McCann TVC which boasts of rich textures and eccentric visuals. In fact, it is very similar in approach to the Canneswinning Happydent White spot which had gum-chewing human torches at a palace! It doesn’t sound like great news for different products whose ads have similar tonalities but if they make us throw our heads back and laugh, who’s complaining?
