Out on top

ADVERTISING

Airtel explores the great outdoors in its new TV commercial, and this time with all the razzle-dazzle. Three girls haggling over what to watch. One says, "I want to watch news." The other wants to listen to music. The third wants to watch movie clips. Life as usual, right?

Wrong. They're haggling over what to watch on a phone handset "" in a tent on top of the world in Ladakh. This is the latest TVC for Airtel, exploring the great outdoors. The last time the brand was out in the wild, if you recall, was with a biplane crash-landing on top of a tree in some rainforest.

The go-wherever, do-whatever proposition has now been articulated and expanded to include a whole lot of razzle-dazzle that a multimedia phone packs into a handful nowadays.

Says Hemant Sachdev, director, marketing and communications, Bharti Airtel, "We thought that the network story had to be told in a different way."

The network plank, after all, is hardly a differentiator any more. The more gripping story now would be usage innovation. The creative challenge, however, was to find that one expression to say it all. "We deliberately used the word 'whatever'," says Santosh Sood, chief operating officer, Rediffusion DYR, "as the ad is targeted at youth, and they use the word 'whatever' very frequently."

The other striking aspect of the ad is its message of female empowerment. "Very few ads show three women going to places like Ladakh without male company," says Sood. It works. It portrays women as independent creatures who use their phones as a mode of liberation "" or whatever.