Archive for the ‘Media & Entertainment’ Category
CENTURYPLY is undoubtedly one of the major furniture brands in India. Century Plyboard stayed away from TV advertising from the last four years, before it came back on TV with its new TVC on the World Anger Day – 28th Aug, 2012.
In this blog post, we shall evaluate this TVC from Century Plyboard and understand if it met its objectives. Please watch the TVC below.
TVC
Objectives:
Though Century Plyboard is a major brand in India and consumers trusted the brand, research suggested that it is not an aspirational brand in the eyes of the consumers. So, Century Plyboard wanted to build a campaign that brings out the brand as a “lifestyle brand” and truly make it aspirational. As we all know, for any brand, the ultimate apex in brand hierarchy is to be aspirational for its target group.
However, in process of making it a lifestyle/aspirational brand, Century Plyboard also wanted to communicate a key functional aspect – “durability of the furniture“.
Let us check the TVC on some of the key parameters.
1. Does it command the attention of the recipient? √
No doubt that the thrown car and the angry gorilla at the beginning of TVC attracts your attention, and is clutter-breaking among any group of advertisements. I would say 100 out of 100 for the Bates team for such a clearly clutter-breaking start for the TVC.
Great! Now that it got the attention of the consumer, it would have to be relevant and communicate the message.
2. Communication of Durability √
As the consumer watches attentively, the next scene that attracts attention is that the gorilla is not able to break the door and it enters the house breaking through the roof. As the gorilla lands on a dining-table, the dining table doesn’t break and the gorilla chases the person in the scene to the cupboard. Until this point, the consumer is still attentively wondering “what is the gorilla upto?”.
Now, as it turns out that the gorilla is the husband’s imagination of his wife’s anger, it brings out an element of empathy and fun making the whole commercial very enjoyable. The message in the background also re-emphasizes on the visual communication.
It is a great story with an element of suspense, and clearly communicating the durability of the furniture. I give 100/100 in the communication of the functional aspect “durability”.
3. Does it bring the Lifestyle/Aspirational element? Χ
Though the advertisement communicates the durability aspect, it communicates it in a raw manner and definitely doesn’t communicate it creating an aspiration for the brand. The point of concern is: is “durability” a differentiated factor among branded furniture or is it a hygiene factor where the consumer is looking for more than durability. This is why Century Plyboard as a brand should become a lifestyle brand and be more aspirational in the consumer’s mind. This helps to enhance the product portfolio and target the up-class consumers, together bringing in the brand aspiration.
The TVC clearly falls short in the aspect of creating aspiration. The commercial is definitely enjoyable and it has the brand recall with “CENTURY PLY” cards at the end of the ad. The advertisement would have been perfect, had the situation been that people don’t have much trust in its durability. However, the situation here is to somehow create an element of aspiration for the brand.
On the whole, it definitely does well on breaking the clutter, consumers will enjoy the ad, communicates the aspect of durability and increases the awareness of “CENTURYPLY”. However it falls short in creating aspiration.
For years, Cadbury Dairy Milk (CDM), India’s favorite chocolate brand, has been trying to be the symbol of celebration and expression of every sweet moment in your lives. In continuation of its pursuit, Cadbury Dairy Milk celebrates the beginning of new friendships with its latest TVC, ‘nayi dosti ka shubh aarambh’. The TVC showcases the first magical moments of a blossoming friendship between a young girl and boy on the sidelines of a wedding, an occasion that in itself connotes new relationships.
watch?v=s2jsCGLO56g&feature=player_embedded
The new commercial plays out at a traditional wedding ceremony. A teenage girl and boy exchange notes on how every family has a “dancing uncle/aunty” and an “allergy aunty/uncle”. They quickly realize that the two families have much more in common than they thought. When the girl excitedly asks, “Tumhaari family mein mere jaisa kaun hai?” the boy smiles and replies ”Main”. A piece of Cadbury Dairy Milk is exchanged to celebrate their new found friendship and the closing VO states, ”Nayi Dosti Ka Shubh Aarambh. Also, the commercial plays the same jingle which would help establish a strong brand recall.
On Air on July 21
It is set to hit TV screens nationwide on July 21, 2012 and is expected to have a presence in over 70 television channels. To further
strengthen the brand’s digital presence, the TVC was released online on YouTube and Facebook on July 13.
Ad Timing: Friendship Day and College Re-opening
The campaign is perfectly timed to be on-air two weeks before the Friendship Day on 5th August. Also, with most colleges opening in June of the year, it also has good timing with students just starting to make new friends in colleges. CDM wants to be the chocolate through which the students express their emotions of the ‘friendship moments’.
The TVC will be supported by a robust integrated marketing campaign, including on-ground activations in 80 colleges, creative print placements, interesting radio capsules in leading radio stations across many cities and outdoor, to urge people to make new friends and celebrate special “friendship moments”.
Symbol of different things in different contextual situations
Cadbury Dairy Milk is trying to own every sweet moment of celebration and expression in your lives. This is part of the long-term brand building campaign ‘Shubh Aarambh‘. CDM has taken a very difficult challenge and it has done a decent job by partly owning the festival and family celebrations with its product line ‘Cadbury Celebrations’. It later built on the valentine moment between a boy and a girl.
It now comes up with this intelligent TVC trying to own the moment of ‘friendship’ with the message and building on its earlier moments – valentine, family, and celebration – with the background of marriage. This is intelligent, as CDM is trying to become the message itself within different contexts, and bringing all the moments together.
It is very encouraging to see Kraft Foods continuing its strong brand-building activities, despite the inflationary times. With the consumers feeling the price increases on all products, consumers are already decreasing their discretionary spends such as chocolates. So, it is very interesting to see whether this will translate into sales in the short-term or not, but it definitely is going to help the brand in the long-term. This is a classic example of a strong campaign with a long-term vision for the brand.
The press release for this advertisement has been shared by the strategic communications agency, The PRactice (www.the-practice.net).
AdStock GRPs
Posted on: June 30, 2012
AdStock is a simple mathematical model of how advertising builds and decays. It is invented by Simon Broadbent as he studied Milward Brown’s ad awareness data.
AdStock helps to:
- Optimize your advertisement scheduling
- Used in marketing-mix modelling to come up with advertising ROIs, etc.
- Helps you decide when to be off-air and when to be on-air
- Helps you understand the advertising decay behaviour
How advertising builds and decays?
Let us take awareness as a parameter to understand the concept of AdStock. As a consumer watches an advertisement for the first time, let us assume that consumer gains certain awareness of the brand, category, etc. Now, when the same consumer watches the advertisement for the second time, the advertisement builds on the awareness. The advertisement hopefully will strengthen the awareness, recall, preferences, etc. So, advertising builds on itself and that is why we call it as a campaign building.
Similar to the way it builds, an advertisement also decays in similar fashion. If a consumer has seen an advertisement A1 10 times in a week and the same consumer has seen an advertisement A2 only once in a week, then the way the consumer forgets the advertisements is very different. The decay rate of an advertisement depends on various parameters such as: the strength of the advertisement itself, media plan, media vehicles chosen, category involvement of the consumer, etc.
The normal GRP data doesn’t take into account the build and decay rates. So it doesn’t take into account the residual effect of advertising, though a company doesn’t advertise in a specific period. AdStock is nothing but the GRP data taking into account of the build and decay of advertising, which is more sensible in marketing applications.
Optimize your advertisement scheduling
As explained, the AdStock GRPs are the GRPs weighted for the advertising build and decay rates.
Let us look at case to optimize the scheduling strategy for an advertisement. For this case, the advertisement is assumed to have a half-life of 6 weeks (hypothetical). This will come out for a decay rate of 12.24% as shown in the table below.
We have four options of scheduling, each using roughly the same (1200-1500 GRPs) amount of GRPs. Once we translate these raw GRPs into AdStock GRPs, it will help us decide which scheduling strategy is the most optimum as explained below.
The AdStock GRPs are adjusted based on the decay rate. For example, the number 469 in Wk 2 is arrived by: (250 of Wk2) plus (250*87.8) (decayed GRPs of Week 1) = 469.
Similarly, 662 in Week 3 is arrived by: (250 of Wk 3) + (250*87.8) (decay of Wk 2) +(250*77.0)(decay of Wk 1)= 469
From the above, it is clear that Option 1 gives the maximum ROI. The other parameter important for selection of an option is the off-air time. Which of the above options gives me the maximum off-air time (when you don’t air the advertisement)?
From the above table, it is clear that Option 1 gives the maximum off-air time for the advertisement by still maintaining more than 500 GRPs. In the above example, 500 GRPs is considered as the threshold and if it goes below, then the advertisement has to come on-air.
To sum it up, AdStock helps marketers understand ‘When to advertise‘? AdStock is commonly used in scheduling, marketing-mix modelling, etc.
Any comments on this regard are most welcome.
Thank you.
Before reading this article, just close your eyes zeroing your mind for a moment and recollect three television advertisements. Write down a few details of each of the television advertisements you could recollect.
Of all the numerous advertisements I’ve watched, I could recollect only three advertisements:
- The old Nescafe advertisement
- The recent Flipkart’s advertisement of office-going children
- The JK Cement advertisement
These are the only three advertisements I could recollect instantaneously. It is strange to think that I hardly could recollect any other advertisements. Now, close your eyes and recollect a few brands. I recollected a few brand names listed the following:
- Dairy Milk (chocolate)
- Kellogg’s
- Dettol
- Coca-Cola
- Pepsi
- ICICI Bank
- Samsung
- McDonalds
- Ford Figo
- Flipkart
Also, if one wants to understand which brands do consumers associate with a category, then we have to ask the consumers to recollect advertisements w.r.t those categories. The above shouldn’t be mixed with this.
Clearly, the top of mind (TOM) set of brands are the above. I read through the list and tried to recollect the last seen advertisement in each of these brands. I could recollect the advertisements of all the above brands. Now, why couldn’t I recollect most of these advertisements in the first question? It is because the first question lacked a context.
This shows that a television advertisement on its own is generally of not much use. But if you provide a context to the consumers, then the television advertisements will help the consumers connect the brand with the context. Consumers going to the shop will subconsciously recognize the brand that they’ve watched it on television. This means if you are investing in television advertisements, you have to provide sufficient contextual support such as in-shop presence, BTL, distribution etc.
Until now, we spoke about two things: Advertising your product on television and creating a context offline. This helps the consumers connect the brand with the context. But what actually helps the consumer receive your communication in the first place.
To communicate something you need to first command the recipient’s attention
Consumers, as human-beings, switch on and off in various situations based on different factors. One of the key factors that make the consumers decide to switch on or off is Relevance. A consumer who is about to buy a car will suddenly switch on (becomes attentive) while watching an advertisement of a car. The same consumer 2 years back might be passive and switched off to advertisements of cars.
Also, anything different from routine generally catches the attention of people. For example, the Flipkart advertisement having elderly looking kids. Another example is the use of celebrities. Because consumers become attentive when they look at celebrities, usage of celebrities and other unique elements commands attention.
I’ve put celebrities and unique creative elements under one category because they are good in commanding attention. But they are not enough. Only uniqueness in the creative will help consumers remember the advertisement, but consumers will not remember the brand of the advertisement.
To communicate something you should be relevant to the recipient
The presence of unique elements or celebrities doesn’t make a communication relevant. But the problem is relevance is something that has to come from the consumers. I cannot shout in the media that I am relevant to you, hear me! For example, a consumer considering to buy a car finds the advertisements of cars relevant. Does this mean that to communicate to a target audience I have to wait for the consumers to feel my category relevant to them? No, in such cases you have to build category relevance to the consumers. You have to give them reasons why they have to use the category.
But, how does one build relevance? Relevance is a recurring theme. You build relevance to a category by relating the category to what is relevant to the target audience. For example, if you want to communicate something on conditioners, you have to make consumers relevant to the category. But the category is very nascent and consumers don’t feel a relevance to the category. So, in such cases you build relevance for conditioners by understanding what is relevant (1-level below) to the prospective buyers of the conditioners and connecting that (1 level below relevance) with the category. So, you come up with elements like softened hair, strong roots, etc which are relevant to the consumer and connect that to the category. This is building category relevance for effective communication. The recent TVCs on Colgate Sensitive Pro-Relief is also an example of the category relevance.
But what if the category is already a well penetrated category like shampoos or toilet soaps? As the category is already relevant, all brands clutter the consumer confusing him and he switches off to the category. This is where brand relevance comes into play. This means you have to make the consumer feel relevant, not by talking about the category, but by talking about the brand. Here you don’t talk about the category elements like softened hair, but you try to build relevance by distinguishing your brand such as natural, herbal, seeds of some plant etc. You have to give reasons to buy your brand and make your brand relevant. This is the true test of marketers on how well they can create the brand relevance – the brand associations, the aura of the brand, brand values, brand differentiation etc. Consumers have to feel a specific brand in the category relevant to them.
Most television advertisements today fail because they are not relevant to the audience and they failed to build relevance. The media is so cluttered today that advertisers struggle to draw attention first, and the very few that draw attention fail in being relevant to the target audience. So, television advertisements are an effective tool to build brand awareness and recognition. But it is a difficult task to build brand relevance using TVCs, because consumers are not ready (and too much clutter) to receive the differentiating factors that should make this brand relevant to them.
In my next post, I will write about how to build effective relevance and how we can connect relevance with the consumer decision making process.
Touch point strategy
Posted on: September 3, 2011
Segmenting consumers and understanding their behavior helps us understand the different customer interactions and touch points available for each of these consumer segments. Understanding the brand personality and the moods the brand can leverage will provide the advantage to communicate the values and be present at relevant touch points.
With the media clutter the consumers are exposed to, marketers and media professionals should continuously innovate on new touch points, optimize every rupee spent, and come up with the best consumer touch point strategy
CONSUMER SEGMENTS
A visit to any mall and you see it is filled with the in-mall activations and the in-store activations. Brand Activations are catching up fast and becoming a serious BTL activity for the marketers and it is no more only for the awareness, PR and couponing. It is fast becoming an important weapon in marketing and brand management.
Brand Activation takes a holistic approach of linking social media, WOM, mobile and creating a unique brand experience to the user. The user will remember the experience as he experiences the brand in a unique way. It also provides more scope for creativity to the advertising and the brand activation agencies to create clutter-breaking interaction with the brand. Ad Agencies like StreetBlimps, Jagran Solutions, Connect Advertising which specialize in developing brand activation concepts, BTL advertising work closely with the event management partners in the delivery.
Star India Pvt. Ltd has picked up the television broadcast rights for Shah Rukh Khan super-hero movie Ra.One, which is currently set for an October release. The company didn’t say how much it paid for the movie rights to one of the year’s most highly anticipated films, but it reflects the aggression with which TV is pursuing Bollywood. With brand new films guaranteed to attract viewers, broadcasters are spending as much as 300 crore rupees a year to purchase TV rights of films, according to some media buyers.
Star also bought the rights for films currently running in theatres – Stanley ka Dabba and Dum Maaro Dum – ensuring that those who didn’t watch these movies in the theatre can catch the movies on TV soon. The gap between the theatrical release and TV premiere is shrinking and with it the window of opportunity for the cinema halls to make money from a film. The whole dynamics of the fastest FMCG (cinema) is changing very fast.
In villages of rural AP, it is not so common to see theatres shutting down as the villagers prefer to watch TV at home than in the theatres. With the increasing penetration of DTH in rural India and with better infrastructure (electricity) the local theatres are facing tough competition from the TV channels. Most people in the villages too get glued to these new movie premieres on TV.
Some of the latest blockbusters shown on the DTH platform attracted as many as 100,000 people on a pay-per-view basis, many of them from smaller towns and cities. Instead of spending money in the theatres, multiple people can watch the movie for 50 rupees at home.
From the film production houses point of view, theatrical releases are still the biggest source of revenues which is the reason why producers should time the release of their films in the theatres and on TV very carefully. The FICCI-KPMG 2011 Entertainment and Media Report points out that with income from other platforms going up, the share of theatres is declining. Currently the share has declined from 79% in 2008 to 76% in 2009 and the report says that it is set to decline to 70% by 2015.
It is to be seen how these dynamics play out in the future which has key implications for marketers and businesses.
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