By: DraftFCB+Ulka Advertising
The new commercial for Tata’s telecom brand is inspired from a video of a chubby Indian child dancing which went viral two years ago. Featuring the same child along with a montage of many other children of all ages dancing to a bollywood song in various indoor spots, the spot winds up at an office desk where a group of colleagues are watching this online. One of them reacts by spontaneously dancing on the office floor, and is cheered by others. ‘open up’ is the big bold copy that takes over the screen later, Followed by the brand signage and the words ‘laugh. Share. Talk.’
Do we like?
Vodafone has ZooZoos, Airtel has Rahman’s tune, Aircel has Dhoni and Tata Docomo… well now they have a bunch of half-naked dancing kids. Welcome to the Indian telecom market, circa 2013.
We pick this new entrant in the ‘Wait... what?’ category for many reasons. It’s the first mainstream ad (to our memory) that’s a direct reference to something that was a social media viral. That it features the same child who’s helped the ‘OMG Funniest Video EVER! – Chubby Indian Kid Dancing LOL’ video on YouTube garner over 43 lakh views so far makes it more interesting but importantly, Docomo’s dhinka-chika comes in a year when Idea’s festival-pegged films are scoring compliments and Vodafone’s ZooZoos have had another super outing at the IPL.
The idea of this we suppose is to push forth the thought of letting one’s hair down and being yourself by ‘opening up’ amidst your social circles. ‘Perfect’, someone at a meeting might have thought, before a bored creative guy saw a video on Whatsapp and applied it to the film. The result is a minute of Indian children dancing in their chaddis to a Salman Khan song.
Superbly funny material, but we didn’t get the ‘buy our data cards ‘cause our network’s the best’ memo. (Not that Idea’s Rakhi-Diwali-X’mas ads had it but at least we recall them as ‘Idea’ ads.)
This film has spurred questions if the parents of these kids are being exploitative and what the psychological impact on these kids would be when they see this as adults, but we don’t have a problem with that. Advertising is evil enough to not care and the parents are all gloating (and well paid) for now. We have enough other ‘exploitative’ issues to worry of!
We hope Docomo’s ‘Open up’ campaign has more in store, for this film is surely going down the route it was inspired from – being just a funny video and nothing else. The last time we saw dancing babies was the Kit- Kat spot, which had many times more thought this one has. Docomo’s ‘stick figures’ are nowhere close to ZooZoo’s appeal and it will take special efforts to compete with others. The spots with Ranbir Kapoor evidently had some.
To watch this film, visit youtube.com/tatadocomo
SOCIAL NEWSFEED
Social Media Week begins today!
‘We are experiencing one of the biggest shifts in how we communicate in human history’ explains a line on the official ‘Social Media Week’ website. Promoted by Nokia, it’s a series of bi-annual conferences happening in multiple cities across the world and it’s beginning in Mumbai today. The entity has a neat history of discussing digital trends so we’re expecting a lot from this week. The speakers for the India edition are a mix of agency people, celebs who’ve used Twitter well (Gul Panag, Suhel Seth) and marketers. More than getting gyaan, we suggest you attend at least one of the days (or follow them all online – we’re sure some annoying hashtag will be trending on Twitter). The topics include crowdsourcing, the new voice of women and one of the usual topics at all events such as these – what is the future of social media!
Pete Cashmore likes this
Best (and only!) use of YouTube pre-roll ads
For the first time, we are saying something in favour of YouTube’s annoying ‘pre-roll’ slot, that fiveto-20-second pause before your video begins. The Australian Federal Police, in a world-first, has launched a ‘Missing Persons Pre-Roll’, aiming to reach out to YouTube users to find over 1,600 ‘long-term’ missing persons in the country. We like this innovative use of space in a clear manner, especially the feature where the ‘skip ad’ button changes to ‘Yes I have’ and ‘No I haven’t’ in terms of having seen the person being described on screen. Moreover, the ads were geo-targeted on the locations where the missing persons were last seen, increasing chances for them being found. The campaign got 1.2 million views in five days, but we want to shout out to brands to improvise this space or keep getting abused.
Mumbai Police likes this
#GoFollow: These Sarkari bodies on digital media
As we realise many of you are folks born in the 70s and 80s, we must tell you of various governmental institutions of our culture then which are getting a new life on the digital space. The National Film Development Corporation (NFDC), promoters of iconic films, have just unveiled a neat (and free!) streaming site which features many films you’ve grown up with. And going forward on that note, we must also tell you that IRCTC, India’s railway ticketing site launched a mobile application just last week… and it’s for Windows phone/tablet users only! We hope there’s one for Android by 2020 and it works. Lastly, the Doordarshan news generation has something to be nostalgic about too, for @DDNewsLive is an active, bilingual Twitter account. That said, none of their tweets will have the charm of a Sarla Maheshwari or a Prannoy Roy!
Sai Paranjpe likes this
