AD Agencies
HSBC appoints L&K Saatchi & Saatchi as its communication partner
MUMBAI: HSBC has awarded its communication mandate to L&K Saatchi & Saatchi for the re-launch of its premier offering in India. HSBC Premier is the group’s premium financial services product, offering exclusive banking services to high net worth individuals.
The agency will be taking forward the globally integrated campaign for the re-launch of Premier. The agency’s Mumbai office will handle the account.
The new positioning for HSBC premier is ‘Personal support, for your Personal Economy’.
L&K Saatchi & Saatchi CEO and managing partner Anil Nair said, “We are extremely pleased to work with HSBC in India. HSBC has given us the mandate on the ‘premier’ business which is very challenging and exciting. We look forward to creating interesting work in collaboration with the HSBC team in India.”
The campaign took an inside-out approach for the re-launch, starting with HSBC’s own relationship managers to better understand the real challenges that their clients face.
Extensive research, consultation and interviews with both relationship managers and clients revealed the insight that high net worth individuals across the world have one major characteristic in common: they each have their own individual, highly personal economy.
Interconnected to all aspects of their lives – whether home, family, work, experiences or passions – their personal economies are always with them, always changing and needing care and attention in order to grow.
AD Agencies
The smell that told Mumbaikars which station was next
Tata AIA turns Mumbai’s Parle-G memory into a sharp, city-wise outdoor play
MUMBAI: When a biscuit factory became Mumbai’s unofficial station announcement. Long before smartphone maps and automated announcements, commuters on Mumbai’s Western line relied on their noses. As trains rolled into Vile Parle, compartments filled with the warm, sweet smell of baking biscuits from the Parle-G factory. It was a cue to gather bags, wake dozing children and shuffle towards the door.
Now that memory has been pressed into service by Tata AIA Life Insurance as part of its 25-year anniversary outdoor campaign — a city-by-city salute to the lived moments that shape urban life.
One hoarding, mounted close to the old factory site, reads: “We have been protecting Mumbaikars since Vile Parle smelled of freshly made biscuits.” Spare. Local. Loaded.
The broader campaign, rolled out across major metros, leans hard into contextual storytelling. In Kolkata, it nods to trams. In Pune, to Magarpatta’s transformation. In Bengaluru, to a time before IT parks. In Chennai, to OMR before it led to tech corridors. Each line anchors the brand’s longevity to a shared civic memory.
The Mumbai execution is the most evocative. For decades, the Parle-G factory was more than a production unit. It was a sensory landmark. Residents nearby set their clocks by the factory horn. Office-goers marked their commute by the waft of glucose and flour. When the plant shut, the city lost more than jobs. It lost a rhythm.
By placing the hoarding beside the former factory, the insurer collapses distance between copy and context. The site does half the storytelling. The rest comes from commuters who remember opening steel tiffins packed with Parle-G, or jolting awake as the train slowed.
It is a neat piece of brand positioning. Rather than trumpet balance sheets or policy counts, Tata AIA borrows emotional equity from the city itself. Twenty-five years becomes less a milestone and more a presence — steady, local, embedded.
Outdoor advertising is often a blunt instrument. This one is anything but. It whispers. It remembers. And in doing so, it sells trust without sounding like it is selling at all.
The scent may have faded. The memory has not.
