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Airtel is aiming for iconic brand stature with its 'border' campaign.

The setting is very West Asian, as if it were a sequence from one of the many art-house films from the region, centred on themes such as "hope in conflict".

Somewhere in the barren dry lands of West Asia, a six- or seven-year-old boy is listlessly eating his meal at home, when a football lands in the balcony.

As he steps out, he finds a boy, of about the same age, on the other side of a barbed-wire fence, perhaps the border of a neighbouring country. The boy asks him to pass the ball. Hesitant to speak to someone from another country "" an enemy, perhaps? "" the boy looks back to see if his folks are around.

He then kicks the ball towards the boy across the fence, who now calls him to play with him. The two sneak through the barbed wires into no-man's land and start playing, as if they have been friends for ages. The voiceover rolls, "Barriers break when people talk", and the ad ends with Airtel's logo and signature tune.

Mobile telephony services major Airtel broke this 80-second TV campaign (there are 60- and 40-second cuts, too) early last month, and is running it on some 70 TV channels (over 18,000 spots) in eight languages, besides Hindi and English. Although the ad is broadcast on a variety of channels, it is particularly heavy on general entertainment and sports.

With this campaign Airtel is trying to move beyond just a brand. Is it trying to achieve an iconic status? What makes brands iconic? H B Holt, a Harvard Business School professor, describes them as ones that have social lives and cultural significance that go well beyond product benefits and features.

Consider the campaign in this context, and you get a sense of Airtel's new marketing and brand strategy.

Airtel's brief to its advertising agency Rediffusion DY&R was straightforward. "To come up with something around the notion 'dissolving boundaries'; the only insistence was to keep it simple, profoundly human, and easy to understand. And at the same time, iconic in nature," says Gopal Vittal, director, marketing and communication, Airtel.

But before how Rediffusion DY&R stood up to the task, a peek into where the campaign falls into Airtel's overall branding strategy.

The campaign is a result of a branding drive that started some 14-15 months ago. Back then, Airtel was trying to identify a brand idea that could cut through a chunk of its communication.

Consumer insights revealed that while mobile telephony represented prosperity, progress and was seen as something aspirational, there was also a sense of people becoming distant from their friends and families "" say, as they move from smaller to larger towns, or up the social ladder.

Says Vittal, "It was this paradox of mobile phones as something aspirational and, at the same time, people losing touch with their human side, that we decided to play upon."

Consumer tracking also provided three other insights: the company should be seen by consumers as one with a wide and efficient network, more innovative, but also caring.

Based broadly on these insights, Airtel chalked out its branding strategy. Branding around the network platform was identified as a key pillar, and the original idea that its network "bridges geographical boundaries" floated.

In the past year, the company launched two big campaigns based on the idea "" first, where a 20-year-old helps reunite his grandfather and father over a phone, and the other, where a child, delighted at seeing the rain fall, wants to share it with his father, again, over the phone.

The current "border" ad is the culmination of the series based on the idea of bridging boundaries, and at the same time, providing Airtel with a stronger brand identity.

Says Vittal, "What we are trying to communicate is to be seen as a brand that is more iconic, which has greater stature and, therefore, a play on the notion that Airtel as a brand bridges boundaries "" the ad simply conveys that if you have a conversation or talk to each other, you become friends."

The company says the concept of bridging boundaries or dissolving barriers, is now a key element for Airtel's branding strategy, and more ads on similar lines will be rolled out in the near future.

It took about five months before Rediffusion DY&R came up with the "right" idea "" in the process, some 40-odd scripts were discarded.

In fact, K S Chakravarthy, former national creative director, Rediffusion DY&R and ad filmmaker, who created the ad, says the original idea he came with was the setting on the India-Pakistan border at Wagah.

"There were soldiers with rifles, dogs and so on, and among the by-standers, a child kicks a football, starting a game of football." But when the ad was presented, Airtel reacted that while it liked the idea of a "border", the India-Pakistan border could be considered too serious and complicated.

The agency then came up with the idea for the current ad with the two boys playing football in no-man's land, which was shot in the arid terrains of Morocco by Prakash Varma, director of Nirvana Films.

Says Chakravarthy, "The exotic location and the fact that we used a foreign language "" a dialect of French spoken in Morocco "" helped the ad stand out and provided a more universal appeal. The point was not what one is saying, but the effort one makes to do away with barriers."

Adds Vittal, "The play is a metaphorical one. The message is universal: if you talk, you make friends." Incidentally, Airtel executives were reportedly a little hesitant about using a foreign language in the ad, but were convinced after seeing the film.

The overall campaign is a 360-degree one, with versions for print, Internet and outdoor hoardings (over 2,000 sites). The feedback to campaign has been good, claims the company. On the awareness index (AI), which is a measure of creative quality, the rating, of eight, is among the highest received by all Airtel ads.

Further, a two-week reading from across the 23 centres Airtel operates in showed a 55 per cent cut through "" which means, over half the respondents noticed the ad as an Airtel one. That's good, say company and agency executives.

How far do all these efforts help in the creation of an iconic brand? Chakravarthy sums it, "When brands evolve, they seek a higher order of value to stay forever relevant to a larger audience. These values go beyond market segments and primary target groups and appeal to the universal truth that lies untapped in the social and cultural fabric. Nike did it with the simple message of realising your potential."

Airtel is clearly hoping its barriers message just does it, too.

WHO DID WHAT

Client: Airtel

Agency: Rediffusion DYR

Client Servicing: Anand Singh and Ashwani Sharma

Creative: K S Chakravarthy , Abhinav Partiman, Daniel Upputuru