India is an emotion market. This has always been so in popular cinema, and this is so in mass-market advertising, as we are reminded by a BrandWagon-Synovate survey of the Most Recalled Ads of 2007 published in FE?s marketing, advertising and media supplement yesterday. By ?ads?, everyone now means TV commercials, so the Top 10 list has no print ad. That?s just a question of media memorability: audio-visual is simply more potent. But the medium here is not the message. The country?s topmost recalled ad is also the one most likely to have choked your voice on first viewing, Airtel?s ?chess? ad. This ancient boardgame of Indian origin is hardly the stuff of high emotion, but the commercial gives a whole new context to the term ?3G? in telecom services. It is about a youngster travelling all the way to a remote village only to put his ageing grandfather in touch with his own long lost son, the youngster?s father, who had run off to the city. The ancestral connect is re-established through a game of chess played over the cellphone, but it?s the tear-jerking moments that make for memorability.
The second most recalled ad is for Cadbury Dairy Milk. It stars a celebrity who, long before he got into the act addressing consumer concerns about worms in slabs of chocolate, was mouthing some of India?s most powerful paternity dialogues on the cinema screen. Other than that, there?s not much in common with Airtel?s ad, since this particular Cadbury ad, about Amitabh Bachchan finding himself in a woman?s body, wins such high recall for its sheer goofiness. A light touch, clearly, can be a winner too?so long as the brand/celebrity has already been invested with universal emotion. The No 3 ad is for Reliance Mobile, again a campaign that has touched people just about everywhere with its vivid appeal. The rest of the Top 10 reads like a humour play list, so one may be tempted to conclude that the emotion thesis does not hold once the sample of memorable ads is enlarged. There is Surf Excel, Vodafone, HDFC Pension Plans, Kurkure, 7Up and Bingo, all of which sprung themselves off TV screens into consumer memory through youthful wackiness of some sort, with a chuckle as part of the desired response. Granted. But most of them are remembered because of a wide-spectrum emotional context. Synthesis, sir.
