Campaign: Hike Up Your Life
Brand: Hike
Company : Hike Messenger
Agency: Taproot India
The Campaign
The commercial starts with a student eager to join the group of cool youngsters in his college, but his mannerisms make him the odd man out. His batchmates shy away from talking to him, ridiculing his behaviour and calling him ?uncle? and ?oldie?. Finally, he takes charge of his social life by downloading Hike messenger app on his mobile, and presto?he is the life of the party. The film ends with his
new found friends swarming around him even as the voice-over goes: ?Switch to Hike, no more what?s crap!?
Two more ads from this campaign have ben released. While the first one talks about Hike keeps ststus updates
hidden so that you can fool your parents into thinking that you are studying while you are partying, the second one revolves around how Hike
allows a subscriber to end messages to a friend who is offline.
Our Take
It isn?t easy being young today. And neither is to be a youth brand. You need to stand out, get peer approval if not peer admiration. So to be one up, what do you do? You become a trendsetter, sport the latest fads, be a hero in their eyes. And that is what Hike messaging app is doing. The campaign aims to strike an emotional connect with youngsters through its witty jingle that the youth can certainly relate to. The essence of the tagline ?Hike Up Your Life? is that no matter what and where you are, there?s always scope for something better?better ways of making friends, better ways of connecting, better ways of chatting.
The Bharti SoftBank funded messenger service has recently added a lot of features including the ability to send free messages via SMS to those who are not on the service, file transfers up to 100MB in size, private and hidden chats apart from the usual stickers and other services provided by rivals like WeChat and Line. The campaign, which includes a few more ads of which two have been released, also addresses issues in the current messaging industry, one such being the lack of privacy. For example, you can choose who gets to see your ?status updates? and ?last seen?. Another feature is ?Hike offline? that allows one to stay connected with friends even when they?re offline. The ?status updates? ad is certainly one of the better ones in the campaign? the middle-aged parents taken in by their son?s smart updates is a delight to watch.
At the same time, the campaign seems to have taken inspiration from Airtel?s ?Har Ek Friend Zaroori Hai? which was made by Taproot too. So we have the quirky friends, the pranks, the bonhomie. It even pokes fun at its biggest rival Whatsapp with its seemingly innocuous ?What?s crap? dig. Well, it?s now time for Hike to prove that it is really one up on its rivals.
?Banasree Purkayastha