MAM
Vodafone strengthens outdoor communications for ‘Vodafone Blue’
MUMBAI: Vodafone has expanded the OOH campaign in collaboration with Bates landscape from 13 cities to all over India for its latest offering the ‘Vodafone 555 Blue‘, a Facebook dedicated handset.
The OOH campaign is conceptualised to bring forth the product offering aimed at its core target audience, viz 16- 25 year olds with a high social and mobile commitment.
The outdoor campaign spread over a month has been currently rolled out in 13 cities ranging from Shillong in the North-east, to parts of Western UP and select metros.
Vodafone India VP- brand communication and consumer insights Anuradha Aggarwal, said, “The outdoor campaign aims to propagate the life of users on Facebook and all the activities they regularly undertake with the ‘Vodafone Blue‘ at the centre of it. We have tried to capture this aspect on hoardings and build engagement through bus shelters with witty messages relevant to our target group and their social online life. In line with the same, the Vodafone Blue OOH campaign is a testimony of our commitment to innovation”.
Bates Landscape Country Head Praveen Vadhera said, “The idea is to create a strong brand recall for the world‘s first prepaid phone with full Facebook integration and experience while on the move. The outdoor campaign underscores the same utilising striking outdoors, elucidating the growing mobile user engagement on Facebook and driving the product benefits upfront to the consumers to generate strong brand affinity.”
Bates Landscape has used an outdoor media mix of several formats for frequency and reach in different cities that comprise billboards, back lit bus shelters, hoardings, gantries and mall media.
MAM
The Merit of Madness: How AI is Changing the Game in Advertising
By Ritz Malik, founder, Ritz Media World.
MUMBAI: When it comes to growth in a competitive landscape, a businessman always has to be a firm believer in Darwinism. You either need to bring a better product, or a better price, or both to the table to get customers and scale. Without this value proposition, you remain unnoticed, and staying unnoticed is not something that a brand wants to do.
You have to do all this and also make sure that you stay cashflow positive at the same time. Otherwise, you’re at a real risk of becoming a large hollow balloon that your competitors are just waiting for to explode or implode under its own weight.
As we’ve entered the era of AI, the notion of a product’s efficacy, cost efficiency, marketability, workflow management, and logistics reliability has become increasingly relevant and prevalently impactful. None of this is background noise anymore. It is the difference between bleeding money on traditional media and actually engineering a profitable campaign.
For example, META’s AI Algorithm has finally given us the ability to measure the ‘CREATIVE’ for a business’s promotions. The best part is that we can do so organically. Content that is actually relevant to the target audience gets more views through reach. This tells us exactly how the audience is reacting before we even scale the budget. This is how we have been gifted the ability to provide merit to the madness of the creative process.
So, our process is as follows:
A set of creatives is built for social media
Their performance is closely monitored for reach and engagement.
Based on the best organic performance, we choose the creative.
Make micro adjustments to add a sales proposition and CTA (but keep it subtle)
Publish the modified creative as an ad.
There’s a lot that goes on in between, but this is the basic method for getting it right. And this is just the AI that’s being used by platforms across the world.
AI utilisation is something that has greatly made the creative process a lot easier. As an agency that thrives on coming up with ideas that are out of this world, we have made the most of leveraging AI to bring ideas to life without spending a fortune.
So, this way, the ability to create high-impact brand stories is no longer under the tyrannical gatekeeping of large budget organisations. It is now that merit solely falls on the storyteller.
Now, AI-powered content production and the AI algorithm on Social Media platforms are asking the question: Is your content compelling?. If yes, the audience will watch your content, share it, and engage with it.
And when it comes to keeping budgets down, we can surely say that it holds the capability to execute million-dollar shoots at a fraction of the cost.
For example, we recently came across a creative challenge by a major Real Estate Developer from Gurugram. They had signed a celebrity couple for their brand ambassadorship a few months ago. They were now about to launch their new project, but for some reason, they could not get their shoot done.
What we came up with was to use the likeness of this celebrity couple and place them throughout the project’s feature video. With the help of AI generation, we were able to rebuild a completely new feature video with their brand ambassadors in 2 days, and no additional physical shots were required.
Imagine being able to save 50-60 lakhs in production costs, 15-20 days in production time, and comfortably be ahead of schedule to launch the project.
This has changed the game entirely. With AI, you can now just acquire the likeness rights of celebrities, and you can just build environments and scenarios with them. The balance between creative and artificial intelligence isn’t a battle for control; it is simply the ultimate tool for survival and scale in a landscape that rewards the fastest and the smartest.
