MAM
Draftfcb Ulka rolls out campaign for DOCOMO’s latest offering
MUMBAI: IPG‘s Draftfcb Ulka has conceptualised and executed a new campaign for Tata‘s telecom brand Docomo. The campaign revolves around the brand‘s latest offering for its pre-paid users, an unlimited data plan.
The telecom category as viewed by the customer is infested with complicated tariffs, conditions on tariffs, riders on the conditions etc, leaving the customer perpetually wondering how much a call actually costs or what the bill would look like at the end of the month. The strategy was to play ‘unlimited‘ as the next big card for the brand to present it as Tata Docomo‘s way of life when it comes to telecom.
Tata Docomo head – brand marketing Ritesh Ghosal said, “Unlimited benefits without the imposition of conditions is fresh paradigm in the category and we believe that played the right way, unlimited products can add a tremendous boost to the growth of the brand.”
The communication challenge for Draftfcb Ulka was to pitch Unlimited Plans on a consumer proposition that the consumer could easily connect with at a life level. The idea was to inform the consumers about the abundance of entitlements that unlimited plans bring to the consumer‘s life. The communication idea revolves from the insight that ‘People get irritated when a good story gets interrupted‘. The promise of the brand that emerged was to help complete every incomplete story in life with Unlimited Plans.
Draftfcb Ulka senior creative director Vasudha Misra said, “The idea was to imagine all conversation as stories. And just as any break in a story – like during a TV show or a film – irritates the hell out of us, so does a break in conversation in real life taking place over the phone or the net. Thus, unlimited plans equal break-free conversation.”
Draftfcb Ulka SVP Sridhar Iyer said, “In this campaign we‘ve played the word unlimited in a refreshingly different way steering the viewer away from suspicion and cynicism which is normally associated with this word and yet hammered home the product message strongly.”
A series of five TVCs has been created to bring alive the proposition of Unlimited Plans. A 360 campaign has also been rolled out to create a surround for the consumer and map the product in the consumer‘s psyche through powerful contextual messaging. The TVCs are produced by Footcandles production house.
MAM
‘You packed my parachute’: Avinash Kaul’s farewell salutes Network18’s unsung thousands
The outgoing chief’s LinkedIn post skips the boardroom tributes and goes straight to the security guards, drivers and office boys who kept the machine running
MUMBAI: Most farewell posts by senior media executives follow a familiar script: gratitude to leadership, a nod to the team, a hint of what lies ahead. Avinash Kaul’s is not that post.
Writing on LinkedIn on his last day at Network18 Media & Investments, where he spent nearly 12 years rising to chief executive, Kaul bypassed the boardroom entirely and directed his most heartfelt words at the people furthest from it: the security guard who greeted him before the building was fully awake, the fleet staff who drove him to airports at ungodly hours, the office assistants, the housekeeping teams, and the administrators who, as he put it, “held ten thousand invisible threads so the rest of us could look organised.”
“You packed my parachute,” he wrote. “Every day. Without fanfare, recognition, or ever asking for it.”
It was a striking note from a man who leaves behind a considerable operational record. Kaul joined Network18 managing three channels and exits with responsibility for 20, alongside a publishing business, a growing connected television footprint, and what he says is the highest revenue and highest channel share in the group’s history. He was quick to deflect the credit. “Not because of me. Because of 4,000 people who showed up, every day, in every department, across the country.”
To content teams across India, he issued a reminder that carries some weight given the pressures Indian news media currently faces. “Keep being custodians of trust for 700 million people. That is not a small thing. That is the whole thing.”
To colleagues in revenue and ratings who found him relentless and hard to satisfy, he was unapologetic but generous. “There was never a single moment of ill intent in my heart. Everything I pushed you towards came from one belief – that you were stronger than you knew, and I was not willing to let you settle for less than your real capability.” Those who believed him, he said, flew. Those who did not taught him to be a better communicator. He was grateful to both.
On what comes next, he offered a hint wrapped in metaphor. Something is being built, he said, prepared for “the way you pack a bag before a long climb. Not out of restlessness. Out of readiness.”
In a media landscape that rarely pauses to acknowledge the people who keep the lights on, it was, at the very least, a different kind of goodbye.
