Changing Trends of Advertisements
Who doesn’t love innovation, good design and creativity? I never forget these lines from the movie “Dead Poets Society” where John Keating, a progressive English teacher recites to his students:
“Medicine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for.”
I believe that that ‘design’ is the only genre where anyone around the artist can criticize him/ her, even without relevant experience in that field, as everyone has their own viewpoints about a piece of art, which can be a song or a painting or any digital piecework.
Whenever I get a chance to design something, the most difficult part is to get it reviewed by users or stakeholders because you may never know what’s coming! Sometimes, the feedback can be quite irritating. The most common ones that I’ve come across are “colours are not nice”, “it looks weird” and the worst one “I did not enjoy”.
What the heck does that mean!
No one likes criticism, it’s a human tendency, but being a designer it’s not that tough to realize your mistakes. If you are an intelligent artist, you can interpret the success of your design from the very first glance of your users, as the feedback is written all over their faces.
You can judge it from their facial expressions, and it worsens the situation when there is a business impact associated with that creative piece. I am specifically talking about digital advertising, also known as online marketing.
Have you heard about Reliance company?
It’s an Indian multinational conglomerate company which is now the second biggest brand globally after Apple and it has a telecommunications subsidiary called “Jio”. The founder’s dream is to provide every Indian with access to affordable and comprehensive internet services and it has attracted nearly 400 million subscribers in just a few years. You can imagine its annual turnover and brand value in the global market but when you’ll look into its online & digital advertisements, I bet you’ll have a very different image of it, at least I had!
The Target Audience
The graphical elements used are so cheap with bright contrasting colours and almost no storyline. I was flabbergasted and started looking for their marketing strategies online and searched plentiful of articles and forums but in vain. To my good fortune, I came across fantastic and intuitive articles that explained the theories and principles used in digital marketing and online advertisements.
They repeatedly used the word “online consumer behaviour” and “target audience”. I heard those keywords earlier as well but not in that context. As I mentioned at the starting of this article, I presumed that ‘everyone likes minimalistic designs and creativity’. This, however, is apparently not the case, which was an eye-opener for me.
I always wondered that since big-budgeted design teams have dedicated designers to create the advertisement content, then there should be no room for the bad advertisements on TV or OTT platforms. But when I read more about the relationship between marketing and human psychology in those articles,
I realized that it’s an entirely different ball game as it largely depends on the ‘time frame’ when users will view the content, the duration of ads., the location (platforms), and the keywords which make an advertisement super successful.
The Intellectual Advertisements
To understand it in more detail, I watched approximately 50 of them again and picked my favourites as well as the ones which I could not bear (like Jio’s). I realized that Cred (app to pay credit card bills) and Dream 11 (fantasy sports platform) campaigns had one thing in common; they openly mocked their own brand ambassadors in their ads. Why would celebs agree to this and what kind of strategy is it? The answer was Social Media.
5 years back, access to these actors was only through traditional media (magazines, newspapers, etc.) and we always saw them at their best but now they don’t dance in advertisements anymore. Moreover, they have opened their lives on social media for all of us to consume. The aura, mystique around these celebrities doesn’t exist as it did 10 years back, which helped companies to utilize these superstars in a creative manner and target the young audience.
These campaigns understood the culture change and appropriated it at the right time. And with this, my inquisitive mind settled down.
I finally learnt the theory behind intellectual advertisements of famous liquor brands like ‘Jack Daniels’ which has a tag line “I always wanted to do this” and ‘Chivas’ with “Some Things Can’t be Simplified”, who sell the idea rather than direct products to their high-end customers. That is why, these brands receive a content insight score of 8.7, alongside an audience insight score of 9.
Despite strict advertising rules and age restrictions, they’ve managed to create engaging content and hit the bullseye with the audience targeting. I finally realized that Reliance Jio’s marketing team is not that untalented as their strategists have entirely different business goals, and how they just focus on their objectives and why they have clear-cut tag lines written in bright colours alluring a specific target audience.
