Campaign: Spice Milaye Sapnon Se
Brand: Spice smartphones
Company : Spice Retail Ltd
Agency: Ogilvy and Mather
The Campaign
The ad opens with a young man somewhere in rural India working out with makeshift strength training equipment?an overhead rod, a loaded cart and wornout tyres. A young woman watches him from a terrace as he throws out the tyres in a manner akin to a discus thrower. Curious, she looks down to realise that he is practising his moves on the basis of the videos on his smartphone. We then see him checking the weight of an Olympics discus on his smartphone, and then looking for the right weight among a set of old discarded truck wheel hubs and rims. He then continues with his training?using a flight of stairs for sit-ups and a rigged up bench press which has two gas cylinders for weights, and running across the dirt tracks, intermittently checking on his smartphone for the world record in discus throwing. The young girl quietly watches him as he trains and as the young man finally hurls his wheel rim-turned-discus into the air with all his might, she claps enthusiastically. The ad ends with the shot of a discus thrower on the smartphone screen as the tagline reads: Milaye Sapnon Se.
Our Take
When there are so many high-end smartphone brands, how do you ensure that you aren?t seen as another me-too brand? By determining which group of customers you want to go after, identifying with their cause and then telling a story that mirrors their life. Spice does it right on all three accounts. In a world full of Samsungs, Apples and Nokias , Spice has done the smart thing by targeting rural youth who too aspire to own a smartphone but may not be comfortable with a brand that looks and sounds too foreign. After all, there is no better way to celebrate the dreams that are so potent in the hearts and minds of young people in the small towns of India than by telling the story of one such dream.So it assumes a persona that is down-to-earth yet dares to reach for the sky, thus building a unique relationship between the brand and small-town youths. It presents itself as a brand that understands their dreams of a better life and Spice smartphones as the best way to explore and achieve those dreams. A very different one to those usually depicted in smartphone ads where the smooth-talking metrosexual guy aspires to impress his girlfriend at the best. This story is about harsh realities, limited possibilities but big dreams, and how the holder of that dream pursues it with the help of his smartphone. The film has been shot in Dholpur, Rajasthan, located on the Chambal River, that flows along the borders of Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan ? a tough terrain that requires guts, sweat and hard toil just to survive, forget realising lofty dreams. The background music, rustic in flavour, is catchy and haunting as it talks about realising impossible dreams. And as you watch the ad, it as if you are silently urging the young man not to give up on his dream.
? Banasree Purkayastha