Baseless Cellular Advertising Causing Confusion

The following article doesn’t mean to hit any specific company/brand but it is meant to highlight few problems arising due to too many theme less TVCs ultimately damaging the brand.

Looking at the TVCs from cellular companies, one can easily categorize the TV commercials into two broad categories, first one is sales oriented ads and the second one depends upon the creators of the ad as to how they take their competitors or how they listen to their bosses. Second category has resulted in some foolish campaigns from our gods of creation and being an ordinary observer, very hard to say but unfortunately, most of the campaigns fall into the second category.

Talking about Zong’s recent BlackBerry campaign where its prime focus was to convey this message, “BlackBerry was not for serious people anymore”, I will have to write that it was simply a wastage of money and the destruction of brand image. Certainly, there were other ways to convey the same message. None of these selling points stands valid for the non-serious class shown in the adverts.

I really doubt if that ad served the purpose or not because that particular ad was restricting a sane person to remain away from Zong BlackBerry. Perhaps the actual theme of the ad was to tell a normal salaried person that he has the access to something that was supposed to be a commodity in the hands of bosses only. Nowhere in the ad was it shown how affordable it was. Same was the case with Z20 campaign where full page ad in the newspaper was dedicated to an elephant which was never able to convey this message that something big costs so cheap. Zong advertising agency has created some very good ads in the past but this time it did not click.

Heavy budgets cannot guarantee quality execution; it was quite evident from Telenor’s EasyPaisa campaign, when one fine morning of October 2009 people found nothing on the front pages of the newspapers whereas the actual message was found inside on another full page ad. Critics say, there was no need to put the message like this, there could have been a better execution. Perhaps, Telenor did this in order to show its might as it wanted to create a big hype of the EasyPaisa product. Similar pattern was followed in the electronic medium and too much hammering of the same ad annoyed the TV viewers beyond extent. Few days later, company had to pull the plug on those commercial as some homework had remained undone. Telenor spent money like water on something that was not completely mature. Necessary agreements were not there to match the frequency of the whole campaign.

Contrary to Zong, Mobilink is doing well with the BlackBerry’s recent campaign; they have maintained the same frequency throughout the years. Similarly, “Jazz international call rates campaign” where a father is missing his son who is abroad, makes sense as this ad is creating a bond between two people and conveying the message at the same time. But, at the same time, another Jazz TVC where reactivating an old SIM gives 50 free minutes clashes with an important rule of PTA. Ad shows a guy using a SIM which is registered in his friend’s name, whereas, every company is bound by the PTA to print this line on every print and TV ad that “using a SIM which is not in your name is illegal”.  So what message this ad gives, to get the free minutes, use a SIM of Jazz which is not yours? Creators must think over it.

How useful a mode of communication is when it is unable to send the actual message? Where our creators have gone? In Pakistan most of the revenue is earned through voice and value added services which is still under 10% and within in that portion of revenue, data or internet usage is negligible. Tired of unused network, Telenor has dropped the GPRS/EDGE prices just to promote the usage of internet on mobile phone. Suddenly, out of nowhere Zong started following the price war for its GPRS services and came up with its own rates. I am surprised that companies haven’t learnt the lesson yet, they are reducing the data rates on GPRS just like they did with voice. Will it increase the data usage? No company in Pakistan is working to increase the awareness for data usage on mobile devices except for the very few campaigns in the last couple of years. It seems, there are no applications in the pipeline which they can introduce to attract users and make those online applications a part of our lives.

Just recently in India, Idea Cellular’s came up with its new “What an Idea, Sirji!” ad campaign that advocates the green message of using mobiles to save paper. And, while the new campaign seeks to boost Idea Cellular’s own new VAS services, it would also benefit other mobile service providers by prevailing upon users in general to use value added services – thus expanding the VAS “product” category as a medium of communications.

The new campaign, developed by Idea’s creative agency, Lowe, is the sixth popular What an Idea, Sirji! series that have been on the air during the past few months.

The ad gives two very clear messages, use VAS and SAVE PLANET. The ad shows it like this, world over, millions of tonnes of trees are cut everyday to produce paper, leading to alarming rates of deforestation hence increasing level of pollution. The new Idea TV commercial showcases how the mobile phone can be used as an efficient tool to read daily newspaper generate e-bills, make payments and transactions, issue e-tickets and boarding passes; thereby saving tones of paper every day.

I don’t need to mention the way Indian cellular companies are handling their advertisements. There, the percentage of weak ads is very low as every cellular company makes sure to convey what it has in mind in a simplest form.

Ufone’s humor has worked so far but too much non seriousness in every new ad has started to work opposite. Ratio of copied ads is digestible but making fun of other companies does not add value to the sector. The recent ad of Ufone “Solid Offer” turns into a childish act at the end when Faisal asks the other to break the glass. There is no message, but just an element of fun. In its every ad, the only idea is to fight on the rates, prove itself cheapest or make fun of any rival. Never in their ads, I noticed them promoting internet usage or e-culture. How long they can fight on rates for the voice domain only is a big question for all the cellular companies.

Few other operators have tried to copy this mockery and humor culture but copy of an already copied ad has proven fatal. Wateen released two ads in which CEO sitting in a management meeting cut everything from product price to salary of the staff in few seconds without considering the situation. Wateen somehow forgot that it was the actual scenario within the company. In the second ad, a wireless modem start jumping itself from the room of subscriber and finds its desired place into the lawn, the subscriber follows it and tries to give a message that Wateen is Wireless and you can take it anywhere. A majority of people I talked to did perceive the ad in a sense that perhaps the wireless modem doesn’t receive signals inside and through its builtin feature it is suggesting the right place to the subscriber where he can get the signals.

Warid, due to their management issues and absence of relevant persons in the company, has not been able to work on sales and marketing for the last one year so we can’t say which message they are delivering. The Glow campaign couldn’t do much whereas the recent TVC showing a teacher being deceived by a student just because the latter is smart enough by using Warid connection is ridiculous. A little older campaign of Warid Top up with McDonalds was a real mess. After watching the entire ad, customer could not decide what needed to be done or what Warid was telling.  The only visible message was the side effects of eating too much burger at McDonalds which was shown from the irritating health of Omar Butt.

Including every company and discussing every ad is not the theme of this article and will not be possible as well, it is just to highlight the need of the hour. Fighting over prices, cheap packages and hitting each other will not bring home the desired revenues, there are other value added services we need to promote to transform into healthy revenue generating services; neat, clean and simple ideas will do much better than dancing and jumping for the sack of fun and the bosses.

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