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Journalism of Courage
It’s dinner hour. A spa masseuse drives home in her new car with much pride after a house call only to face her fuming younger brother. Boys in the neighbourhood have been telling him that his sister’s success is not worthy of respect, because her skill lies in giving people a “happy ending,” a euphemism for pleasuring. The young woman’s mother, too, freezes in the moment, wondering whether her daughter is doing the right thing. Momentarily hurt, the masseuse explains how she gifted a “happy ending” to a weary woman, who had had a hard day at work or who had just delivered a baby. She then prepares her brother to battle stigma, saying society always questions a woman disregarding her skill, in this case, mastering anatomical science.
The short film, Chhoti Soch, is part of home-services firm Urban Company’s digital ad campaign that questions societal bias against women who do odd jobs, denying them the dignity of labour. The ad had such resonance, recording over 169,571 views since it first dropped on March 1, compelling tennis ace Sania Mirza and yesteryear’s actor Zeenat Aman to unburden their own experiences.
Mirza recalled how she was questioned about settling down and meeting expectations despite being the first Indian woman to win a WTA title or winning grand slams as the world number one in doubles. Aman recalled how her son had been enraged by the insulting remarks his playmates had made against her line of work as a glamorous actor. The ad led to conversations, including whether Urban Company itself respected its women workers enough to pay them well. In many ways, advertisements in India have moved from being just a sales pitch to becoming an ideas forum that gives legitimacy to what we do not talk about enough.
Binaifer Dulani, creative and founding member, Talented, who conceptualised the Urban Company campaign, recalls the hours she spent on creating an inclusive arc of women who were self-made and often used social media platforms like YouTube to promote their small businesses and skill sets. “But their voices aren’t part of the popular narrative. There is a respect gap between white-collar and blue-collar employees. In the past, media portrayals of massage therapy have been equated with sex work. This film translates the lived experiences of over 100 spa professionals who lead dual lives. They own multiple SIM cards, lie to their families and accept bookings 5-10 km away from their homes because of the stigma. We created equity for the masseuse,” says Dulani. This doesn’t look like advertising anymore; it’s everybody’s untold story.
Dulani and Kopal Naithani, founder and director, Superfly Films, who have earlier worked on thought-provoking ads for Tanishq, peeling layers of the man-woman relationship, have taken their storytelling from the traditional TV to the digital plane. They are living the shift in the advertising industry, which has raised the bar from just sales-driven messaging to planting change-making initiatives and alternative thinking. As Naithani explains, “Indian ads have always been warm and relied on emotions. But now they have taken a step forward, become bolder and present a slice of life. The spa masseuse ad not only talks about strong women, it is also about encouraging these women to raise stronger men who can be equity advocates for the future.”
Narrative gets a nudge
This is vastly different from TV commercials of the 1990s, when a post-liberalised India was breaking away from Doordarshan and moving to satellite TV. A generation was opening up to choices and aspirations were born. This was caught by Hindustan Thompson Associates (now Wunderman Thompson), which convinced a nation that Lehar Pepsi was the choice of a new generation, with the country’s first-ever 90-second TV ad. Featuring pop icon Remo Fernandes and filmstar Juhi Chawla, it began the reign of celebrity endorsements and set up big dreams of conspicuous consumption.
This bigness lost context when Indians no longer saw the cola as a metaphor of having arrived. “Now an ad is compressed between several windows on your device and fights for attention. The only way it can grab you is if it is personal and has something to say. Material acquisitiveness has reached a saturation point as you are flipping between five devices at the same time. So we are not really looking at being dazzled by TV or billboards. Even the latest Apple device has ceased to be an exclusive privilege,” says filmmaker and former adman Niranjan Kaushik, who has worked on long-running TV campaigns like Cadbury’s Kuch Meetha Ho Jaaye and Asian Paints’ Royale wall series with celebrities. He remembers how he hit upon the idea of selling a premium paint at a time when people fiercely guarded their pockets. “We hit upon the idea of doing up a single wall like a showpiece,” he says.
That’s how he shot a series of ads, featuring Saif Ali Khan placing his choicest possessions and heirlooms, among them his guitar, on a richly textured wall. If it was about owning royalty in a corner like an artwork, the latest series of the brand’s ads, featuring Deepika Padukone, are about convenience, a fuss-free finish for the whole house that can be cleaned with a wipe. Paint as décor has given way to functionality. “A creative director has to ensure the ad doesn’t look like a forceful imposition or talks down but has engaging content that echoes the customer’s concerns at a moment in time,” says Kaushik.
For instance, Cred, a reward-based credit card payments app, masked its ad as scrollable content. Featuring Aman, a late debutante on Instagram but emerging as an influencer, the ad encouraged viewers to link their RuPay credit cards to UPI to become as hassle-free as she was. Or consider actor Ranveer Singh’s witty and sarcastic take on erectile dysfunction for the men’s sexual wellness brand, Bold Care, which subverted all TV tropes. A satiric take on saas-bahu serials, it shows Singh and porn star Johnny Sins as brothers in an Indian parivaar. Sins’ onscreen wife is about to leave her marital house even as Singh, playing the patriarchal elder brother, tries to persuade her to stay back. He prods her till she reveals the couple’s anxieties in the bedroom. Singh hands Sins an enabler product. A couple of slow-motion stunts later, the aggrieved wife decides to stay back.
This ad made waves because it challenged the perceived alpha nature of men. First, Singh appears as an elder brother to the older-looking Sins, challenging ageism. Second, by portraying Sins as suffering from erectile dysfunction, the ad strips the vaingloriousness associated with male libido. Alpha males can be impotent, too. Third, the woman articulates her right to be pleasured in a marriage not before her mother-in-law but her brother-in-law or jethji, who offers a practical solution than being tongue-tied and stunned. The kicker, though, is in the punchline, #TakeBoldCareofHer, linking male performance to female contentment and not the other way around.
Being culturally sound
Since Instagram reels and YouTube videos are now a direct competition, ad makers are thinking of new strategies. “Now you can treat ads like short films. TV would confine you to 10- to 15-second slots, but now, you have a minute-and-a-half easily,” says Bharat Bala, who made the memorable Nescafe ad with the melodious punchline, “The taste that gets you started up”. That standout campaign in 1998 profiled India’s young, upwardly mobile professionals reaching for the instant coffee, the drink replacing cola as an endearing Western beverage. It was the age of the yuppie, which the dictionary defines as “a successful young, professional, who lives in a city, earns a lot of money and spends it on fashionable things”. This group is now India’s most defining demographic. It also spawned a local terminology called “guppie”, young professionals making it big in the then-nascent multinational enclave, Gurgaon.
Coffee-drinking became an experience to aspire for. It was an elite pursuit, not a familiar experience. But Nescafe, subsequently, opened up the same brand for the masses as the cafe culture swamped metros. “India’s deep mobile connectivity means that both choices and content have been democratised. The person in the backseat of the BMW is watching the same content as an auto rider on their device. The protagonist has to be about the one who is getting there,” says Bala.
And even as Indians are comfortable with their identity in a global world, Bala’s latest film on Air India’s inflight safety guide, presented through traditional dance forms, has got more hits for the airline than a formal ad. “You may say it uses cliches of colour and dance mudras but it also shows an India that’s becoming honest about culturally anchoring itself,” says Bala.
Two years ago, Subhashish Dutta, former creative director and now consultant with McCann, was looking for immediacy while working on Hero Motocorp’s Scooty campaign. “We took on the taboo of women being bad drivers. We collated the slurs that a woman faces on the road and made a rap song with the chorus: Accha hai ladki chala rahi hai. We got Alia Bhatt, the proverbial everygirl, to drive home the message that women make the safest drivers,” he says.
Overturning social stereotypes of a stranger is what has made Ogilvy’s recent Brooke Bond Red Label campaigns restore faith in tea as a conversation starter. Be it an elderly woman who takes a flask of tea to the hospital OPD everyday to calm anxious relatives of patients or an unkempt man offering tea to a blind passenger on a train, who says, ‘I don’t need to see when I can smell truth’ — they reinforce the message that what we need most is humanity. “Hence the resonance,” adds Dutta.
Up, close and personal
With bigger brands moving away from celebrities, unless they become an everyday character, the customer becomes the protagonist. “With stars posting their morning coffee and their make-up hacks on social media, their aura, and with it the user’s aspiration of what they embody, have all but evaporated. The star and the fan are now equal stakeholders in a shared space. Like the star, the brand is also reaching out to its user directly,” says Kaushik.
He cites Cadbury’s latest Mother’s Day campaign as an example, describing it as “nothing out of the mill but they owned it.” The chocolate brand created a micro site, asking every user to fill out some personality detail of their mothers. Creators then fed every mother’s description into ChatGPT and asked it to compose a song based on the information. This was set to music, an mp3 file was created and emailed to the mothers. “This is what we call sticky advertising and it is fast catching up,” says Kaushik. Then there is Zomato, who made the daily news cycle its promotional vehicle, retweeting news that would suit its customer base, especially those around food, and adding its take on them. The consumer, in that sense, has become the new showrunner.
The economics of it
But then, every big idea comes at a cost. While TV ads at one time had the lion’s share of the budget, the same budget is now split across several media platforms. “It makes sense to go digital where you can rationalise spends other than basic production costs. That’s why more start-ups choose digital advertisement only,” says Dutta. Of course, the return on investment has almost trebled. “If the ad goes viral, people keep sharing. So the brand image gets amplified at zero cost. Also, there’s instant gratification. The like buttons and comments are a barometer of whether you have successfully engaged your audience. You get a data-driven response without investing in analytics,” he adds.
Whatever the shift, advertising is about talking to everybody from six to 60. As the guru David Ogilvy had said, “Golden rewards await the advertiser who has the brains to create a coherent image.” In the end, emotion is the only constant.
