 "Crafting stories, building brands")
The long and short of it: KV (Pops) Sridhar
Stories are the earliest form of communication known to man. We connect through stories, sharing lessons, morals, beliefs and emotions as we tell them in our own unique ways. Advert-isers are our modern-day story tellers. Today as we adopt the digital space, we are experiencing the next level of storytelling, which industry calls long format advertising, usually 1-5 minutes duration.
The change is welcome; it is encouraging to see advertisers keep purpose and emotion at the heart of the narrative and let products make up the background. This reflects the maturity that society and the advertising community is undergoing. But I hope we don’t fall into the trap of creating long format ads for the sake of it.
The guiding principle here must be to tell a good story. The skills needed are no different from a good short ad or a good film. The power of such a format does not depend on the duration of the commercial, but on the content of the message and the ability to convey it.
The first thing to do is to ensure that storytelling is not confused with duration, social cause and style alone. It is not about creating an extended TVC by just changing the duration from 30 seconds to three minutes. It must reflect the brand’s determination to bring about change; it’s not about the number of hits, it’s about the number of hearts touched; it’s not just about ‘likes’, it’s about love; and it’s not about product selling, but story-telling.
At present about ten per cent of the long format ads that work are conceived, written and directed to do justice to the duration and the space. The Fortune Oil’s Daddi ad, Nestle’s stammering stand-up comedian and cartoonist ads, Lifebuoy’s Gundappa, Google’s reunion and such others show that people go for authenticity. But an ad for Wagh Bakri tea that has a husband realising how much he loves his wife is beautifully told until the last 1.5 minutes of the 4-minute video pan in on clichéd underwater shots of tea leaves.
Long format advertising has to acknowledge the different nature of the audiences it is reaching out to too. Unlike the passive audiences sitting in front of a TV set, people can engage with the purpose, with the brand. They can comment, create more content and we should invite them to be a part of the story.
There are some myths about the format that need busting. It is believed that long format ads cost next to nothing and that length is not an issue, but the reality is that maximum people drop off after 15-20 seconds, so it is better to aim for depth of engagement. A good story is not about the money spent nor is it about how long you keep the reel running. And finally, we should work on the Inspire-Interact-Amplify framework; to start with viewers should be able to click on products they see in the video, donate for a cause and interact with the people. A lot more can be done in this space but it all starts with a relevant story that is well told.
KV (Pops) Sridhar
Chief creative officer, Sapient Nitro
Chief creative officer, Sapient Nitro
More misses than hits: Ambi M G Parameswaran
Does long format advertising work? To get to the answer we need to understand the power and role of ads in our lives. In 1990 Alexander Biel published a seminal article in the <I>AdMap</I> titled ‘Love the Ad. Buy the Product’. Further research in 1996 showed that consumers tend to like ads of brands they patronise. In 1990 and 1996 (<I>Journal of Advertising Research</I>), researchers asked why a consumer liked or loved an ad and the most common reason was that it was about a brand that they use. But keeping that ‘double jeopardy’ issue aside, there were many other reasons for loving an ad. Consumers love ads that give them new information, even if it is not too high on the entertainment quotient.
Some recent examples illustrate the point — an ad for blood pressure measurement, the Amazon Kindle ad that shows how it comes with a dictionary pre-loaded and one by a car major that shows how ABS technology works (in a Tamil daily if you please). These ads managed to communicate new information and may have scored big with readers/viewers but were not what we would typically qualify as great pieces of entertainment.
In a growing consumption economy such as ours, there is still a lot of useful information that brands can share with consumers. And here, digital media offers new avenues for brand marketers. They can create a short film for TV and run a longer, more explanatory film on digital platforms. Unfortunately one is not seeing too much of that. Both agencies and marketers are happy making long format ads that are good pieces of entertainment, with little new information.
Let us go back to the first big experiment done on long format ads, the BMW Hire series. They were great pieces of entertainment but importantly they were nothing but product demonstration films couched within a story. Remember these became viral hits before YouTube was born.
The digital medium offers brands an opportunity to tell longer stories. But to make an ad lovable there is a need to balance news and entertainment. Just telling a story for five minutes that barely makes a direct connect with the brand will not go far. And on the other hand, a five-minute product demonstration will not get enough ‘shares’. One must balance the two narratives. Most importantly nothing becomes a viral hit on its own. It has to be promoted actively and big money must be spent.
Coming back to our original argument as to whether liking an ad will make a consumer buy a product. We saw that a user of a brand will probably like the ad more than a non-user. So a big brand has a head start in the liking department and can do a lot more in the digital medium. That said, just a nice piece of entertainment will not do the job for most others. You need to struggle to ensure that you balance information and entertainment. And I am seeing numerous misses, and very few hits. The soil is ready, you need the right seeds to be planted.
Ambi M G Parameswaran
Advisor, FCB Ulka Advertising
Advisor, FCB Ulka Advertising
The subtle art of persuasion
Many were moved to tears by the 2013 ‘Google reunion’ ad for Google search, which brought two friends separated during the partition of India and Pakistan together. The three-minute long film has spawned an entire generation of stories within ads. Among the most recent ads that have hit the emotional note with viewers are Urban Ladder’s film called Homecoming, HUL’s Lifebuoy film and Asian Paints’ Bengali film woven around Durga Puja. These films were released on YouTube and on television and are centred around the festive season. About a year ago, there was the Wagh Bakhri ad where a wife has to leave the house for her husband to realise how much he loves her, but the trend is even older if we turn Westwards — the BMW films, Lady Gaga’s 10-minute video where several brands make an appearance and Kraft Foods’ 27-minute crowdsourced film for Greece. Increasingly brands are looking to engage with their consumers for more than 30-seconds, and advertising is looking for new ways to tell their stories.
The views expressed here are strictly those of the authors.
