MUMBAI: Harper Collins India celebrates 25 years in India through a film that celebrates books. The campaign consists of a film that shows the journey of a novel. The novel titled ‘Journeys Never End’ exchanges hands through the film. 

The film starts with an old man holding the novel whilst traveling in a bus. As the bus stops at a church, he forgets the novel behind. A young man notices the book and picks it up to give it to him but the bus leaves. We see a young woman board the same bus and take the seat adjacent to the young man. She notices the book in the young man’s hands. Seeing her interested in the book, the young man hands it to her and leaves as his stop comes. 

What she finds written on the first page of the novel gives the film an unexpected twist. 

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The film ends with supers,“Stories create books. Books create stories”and the HarperCollins India logo. 

The campaign was launched at the Jaipur Literature Festival, 2017. The film launches on social media on January 20. 

Says Ananth Padmanabhan, CEO HarperCollins India, “We made this short film to celebrate our lifelong passion for storytelling. Something that simply reaffirmed the power of stories and the fact that books open up a world of unimaginable possibilities. And in Taproot Dentsuwe found the perfect partner. Narayan’s love for the written word and Titus’ spontaneous creative impulse were the perfect combination. We all have a story and we love stories – and we thought that this was a great way to say it!”

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“In the advertising business, we keep talking about how we are all story-tellers. Here was an intriguing brief that had us create a story about stories, without the story-teller intruding. When we asked Ananth ‘What do you want to happen as a result of this?’ he said, “The outcome I want is for the viewer to say ‘I want to pick up a book now!’ after seeing the film.” The insight was—in retrospect—very simple. Each of us is a story-creator, sometimes not knowing that’s what we are, mostly not knowing what triggers await us around the corner. That’s the basic reason books appeal to us: they tell the stories we believe we could have created. After all, our lives are a series of stories,” said Narayan Devanathan, group strategy officer, Dentsu India.

“HarperCollins is such an iconic brand with about 200 years of history. It was a great experience to work on this brand. Ananth’s brief took me back to my literature days. Books contain stories. But I thought there are stories that exist outside the books as well. That’s how the line came up. Books create stories. Several stories emerged from this line. We just decided to break the campaign with the Firoza one,”said Titus Upputuru, Creative Head, Taproot Dentsu Gurgaon.

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