Wednesday, January 09, 2013

If 30 second films win hearts, this one ropes-in the mind too!

This is Docomo’s third ad-campaign during the IPL season, making it three in a row. Expectation from the brand is overblown, but the TVCs are bound to leave an impact

For every minute that went by in February last, Tata Docomo lost 44 customers in the domestic telecom market. That reality was unique to just Docomo. Every other telecom operator’s subscriber base grew during that month. While the industry’s overall base grew 0.82% to reach 911.17 million in February, Docomo lost 2.1%. In terms of customer additions during the month, while the top four players showed a remarkable rise – Bharti Airtel, Reliance, Vodafone and Idea, Docomo’s m-o-m growth fell 24.6%.

While industry watchers blamed the brand rejig exercise (that saw all brands of Tata’s telecom – Indicom, Photon & Docomo – being brought under the Docomo umbrella) for this performance, company sources told 4Ps B&M that the fall in customer base was only because they got rid of all non-active customers from their database. Sounds fair. Whatever be the cause, we have seen the effect. As for the company, by launching a TVC campaign (of four ads so far titled, Idli, Menu, Spoon & Cricket match), it made a prominent mention that it will try all to rebuild equity of the brand, and not slip beyond the 6th spot on the whiteboard.

Like the previous two years, the company chose the IPL season (April-May) as the months to step on the gas as far as advertising is concerned. The campaign also marked a hattrick of togetherness for the trio – Ranbir Kapoor (RK), Docomo & IPL. Unlike the previous two years however, this time, the TVCs contain that extra dash of humour. There is a common production set used for all four ad-films, and the character count is limited in each TVC. Though the scripts used are brief, the creative concept from the shelves of DraftFCB-Ulka helps in getting the message across to the audience without burning much air time. That is praiseworthy. Then of course there is Ranbir, who plays the role of an old ‘phlegmatic’ man, and as expected, does well. Talking about the advantages of roping-in the popular young actor for the third IPL in a row, Ritesh Ghosal, Head – Brand Marketing, Tata Teleservices, says, “In a cluttered window as IPL, where I get 120 seconds spot in a three hour game, in order to stand out and make the most of this very expensive media property, I needed to do all I could to make the ads work. So, we kept the ads short. Also, with Ranbir Kapoor, you get the direct benefit of his fan following, besides being guaranteed of a good act in your TVC to appeal to your TG of 15 to 35 year-olds.”


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