The latest Reliance advertisement features Hrithik Roshan as a Pied Piper. Here is the YouTube link for those who have not seen the ad, or have seen it but not found it attractive enough to remember it.
Hrithik Roshan dances beautifully to the fluty Reliance trademark music with a flute in hands, hearing which a number of ‘mouse shaped’ things follow him all the way through the roads of the town and fall from the cliff, into, I assume, the water.
This is the only impression I got when I first saw the advertisement. I kept thinking about that quintessential essence, The Message, all through the night. Initially, I thought the ‘mice’ must be customers, but it didn’t make sense for them to fall down from the cliff. Then, I thought they must be the competitors who are always trying to follow Reliance and end up going nowhere but down finally. I had to see the advertisement once more to ascertain that these were things like “Conditions apply”, “STD” etc. that were falling down – funda being that Reliance’s scheme is straightforward, simple and comes with no strings attached.
This reminded me of an article I had read recently. The article talks about how complex language is weakening brands. Though it focuses on how one should focus on specifics rather than generalities, the point is “Let’s focus on the message, the single point agenda. There is no point in using all our linguistic skills in trying to complicate matters for millions of customers processing thoughts in a multitude of different ways”.
In the past one week, I have seen a slightly modified version of the same Reliance ad. The dancing sequences have been truncated, suddenly the Marketing & Communications team out there seems to have realized that maybe something is wrong after all, the message about what exactly the Pied Piper is trying to do with the mice is not getting across. The advertisement has now been modified with textual insertions on the descriptions of the scheme – 50 paise per call, no conditions attached, same charges for all kinds of calls etc.
I wonder why brands cannot be smarter in being to the face and to the point, rather than try being subtle and use all their ‘business energies’ in setting cryptic crosswords for viewers. The viewer does not like crosswords for advertisements, he actually does not like advertisements. He switches channels and moves on to the next show in the flick of a second. Maybe, here, the creators were riding on Hrithik’s face value to make the ad click. That brings us back to the eternal celebrity endorsement question, “Can you make your brand so dependent on your ambassador that you forget to put forward the benefits of your brand and product and focus instead on the skills (in this case dancing) of the celebrity endorsing it?” If yes is an answer to that, it sounds like a very unhealthy option in my opinion.

