Brand Recall

This brings to mind another concept in Marketing called “In Film Advertising”. The credits to have started this concept goes to a renowned director who had to wait for a long time to get the Academy awards. But when he did, it was a downpour. Steven Speilberg it is! The concept is popularly believed to have started in a movie which captured the hearts of young and the old alike and is also one of the first movies of a current day heart throb. Drew Barrymore. Haven’t you guessed the movie yet? E.T – The extra-terrestrial. The brand M & M’s.

I have had the experience of going through “In-Film Advertising” though with Bollywood. The concept works very differently in India. The movie that I was involved with (in a small way though) was “RUN” (remake of a tamil movie with the same name) featuring Abhishek Bachan. The involvement was for a two-wheeler brand based in Delhi. Unfortunately, neither the brand nor the movie did well!

Lowe (what used to be Lintas) has a unit called Lintertainment focussing specifically on this segment of the market. It used to be headed by Ashish Bhasin. (Heard that he is now taking care of another division focussing of TTL – Through the line Marketing). Many other agencies have followed suit. A bad example of IFA (In-film advertising for simplicity’s sake) is the movie called Yaadein. The film had an overkill of various brands (Coke, Pass Pass, Hero Cycles and what not!) presented in the most irresponsible and illogical way. You can’t have the hero of the movie belting out a line asking another character to have a sip of Coke with the claim that it would help him think! It was a disastrous attempt of shoving all these brands in.

Hollywood has handled IFA in its own way. Take a two and half hour advertisement for FedEx. Can’t think of a better way to weave an brand into a story and presenting it in the most believable way. Cast Away is still touted to be the longest running advertisement (in terms of duration) for any brand. FedEx will be all over the place. It would have cost them a bomb to have their name all over the movie. And they actually show FedEx employees as people who value the packages they carry more than anything else. Tom Hanks actually rips opens the packages that gets washed ashore only after waiting for a significant amount of time. It must have done a lot of good to the brand internally and externally!

IFA is a very workable concept if handled deftly. It shouldn’t be mis-used just to be shown as a hoarding that gets ripped apart by the hero’s car that flies in the air and lands and still RUNS??? It is high time that the movie makers, brand owners and the advertising agencies wake up to such cruelties affected on brands like Coke which took a painful century to build, just because the producer / director insisted so. Time to wake up!

I can actually see Govinda in his inimitable Yellow Shirt pulling out an Oral-B and Red Close-Up wearing a Bombay dyeing night suit brushing himself looking into a Saint-Gobain mirror. Aaawwwwh!!!! It’s boring. Can we think of a story behind each brand? I am sure there is more to every brand than just being part of the props. Right?