Jas Business Blog

Most of the ads are supposed to lure the customer or a decision maker towards the product. But then there are other advertisements where the intended effect is negative, the intended recipient of advertisement need to be taken away from a product. Mostly these will be done by the social groups and non profitable associations. An example would be adverts warning people against use of tobacco or urging women to not ignore the symptoms of breast cancer.

After skin cancer, breast cancer is the most commonly diagnosed form of cancer in women. Although the shocking death of Jade Goody has had an impact with many women taking notice from their slumber about the silent arrival of cancer in their lives even at the young age. But still most of the women remain oblivious of the danger. Hence the need for adverts that should not only communicate the dangers, but should also kick them out of the slumber by introducing the feeling of fear or concern in them.

About ninety percent of the women in the world suffer from this ailment and  still ignore it due to sheer negligence. I am very sure no woman would want to face this trauma at any age. The thing with this ailment is that age is not a factor. It can happen at any age and as for the causes; research is still on. An estimated more than 1 million cases will be identified this year, and about 510,000 new and existing patients will die from the disease. In the U.S., breast cancer will be diagnosed in 1 in 8 women. in most other emerging economies, breast cancer is a relatively new concern, something that both patients and doctors are only haltingly learning how to treat. Previously a malady that mostly afflicted white, affluent women in the industrial hubs of North America and Western Europe, breast cancer is everywhere. Asia, Africa, Eastern Europe and Latin America have all seen their caseloads spike. By 2020, 70% of all breast-cancer cases worldwide will be in developing countries. The incidence of breast cancer in India is on the rise and is rapidly becoming the number one cancer in females pushing the cervical cancer to the second spot. It is reported that one in 22 women in India is likely to suffer from breast cancer during her lifetime.

As the challenge remains to make women keep checking regularly using self examination, most of adverts are only successful in making women getting concerned but do not evoke a self responsibility to do self examination regularly. This particular ad campaign is worth showering accolades for raising awareness about importance of self-exams.

Anti Stress Balls
You don’t see breast cancer. You feel it

Stress balls have been used as a marketing tool for quite some time now, but this was very innovative campaign. The briefing for the ad agency (and the challenge) was to create a simple low-cost action to raise  awareness among women about the importance of self-exams and thus help them detect breast nodules or lumps. Simple and revealing, just like the self-exam.

The agency created an anti-stress ball with a deformed stone inside (see pic below), simulating a tumor. On squeezing the ball, the women feels a foreign object which raises her curiosity. The ball has the text that reads, “You don’t see breast cancer. You feel it. Do the self-exam”. 50,000 balls and a flyer – explaining the correct way of doing the self-exam were produced and distributed to women on the street, at companies, hospitals and at theme-related events.

Result was that during the action period, records showed a 22% increase in mammography exams and a 28% rise in hospital consultations. Bravo!

Advertising Agency: McCann Erickson,

If you are an Indian with access to television or internet or have seen any IPL match then I do not need to tell you what the heck is Zoo Zoo. The ad campaign that has suddenly taken over the any god damn media and has become the talk over lunch, coffee, tea, date, time pass talk and even office conversations! So what is this zoozoo and how is it made, are they actual people, dummies, animations or what? If you ask me, that particular query itself has a lot of hand in the advertisement’s success as television commercial and internet viral.

First of all what is this ZooZoo? zoozoo is the new brand endorsor for Vodafone India. In 2008, Vodafone had unveiled the ‘Happy to Help’ series during the first season of the Indian Premier League (IPL). With the launch of the second season, Vodafone has given birth to the Zoozoo: a special character created specifically to convey a value added service (VAS) offering in each of the newly released commercials.

What’s interesting is that there are some 25-29 such commercials planned under this campaign, some of which are already on air. The aim is to release approximately one ad a day, to sustain interest till the end of the IPL.

Success of this campaign has been humongous! It’s fan club at Facebook already has 188,822 fans base!!

What need does zoozoo like campaign caters to, apart from publicity of the brand? Explains Harit Nagpal, chief marketing officer, Vodafone India, “We’re acquiring customers at a very fast pace, but a large number of them are unaware of the range of services we offer. I mean, ‘phone backup’, which we’re advertising now, was launched two years ago, for instance!”(well this a news to me too!- Jas)

Behind Camera – Making of zoozoo

No, they aren’t animated characters. They are human beings who were made to wear body suits. “The design of the characters is such that one gets fooled into thinking it is animation,” shrugs Rao, which was indeed the very illusion that had to be created. “In a sense, it is ‘live’ animation!” he quips, referring to the fact that it was all shot live. The films shot at 20 frames per second has made the Zoozoo’s movements hurried and comical. See the images below to know how these ads were made from people.

Ogilvy experimented with several characters and finally took its love for the term ‘egghead’ one step too far, creating characters that don the colour white (with black dots for eyes and a mouth), have heads resembling eggs, and disproportionately thin bodies.

The idea is to tell the VAS stories in a world akin to, yet different, from humans. The creatures were then given a characterisation: they are to lead simple lives, speak a language of their own (something that sounds like gibberish), move in a certain way, and even emote like human beings, with big frowns or big grins to do the trick. The execution is almost like emoticons. “We even limited the number of emotions to be used, to keep things easy,” says Rajiv Rao, executive creative director, South Asia, Ogilvy India.

If one wishes to understand the size of this head, here’s a fact: a human head would typically reach up to the mouth level of this giant Zoozoo head. “We kept the hands and legs thin, which is why we cast women – and occasionally children – wearing the costumes,” says Prakash Varma, ad filmmaker, Nirvana Films, who has directed the commercials. The thin limbs, contrasted with big bellies and a bulbous head, all add to the illusion that these creatures are ‘smaller’ than humans. Sets were created to suit the size of the Zoozoos.

The films were shot by Nirvana in Cape Town, South Africa, with the help of a local production house there, called Platypus. Incidentally, the same combination of people also worked on the ‘Happy to Help’ series last year. When asked whether Cape Town is fast becoming a tourist spot for Vodafone and Nirvana, Varma laughs, saying, “Oh no! It’s just that we are very comfortable with the team there and know what sort of work to expect from them.”

Happy Mothers’ day!

With time I have realized one thing, out of all the relations, its the relation of mother and a child which one will feel as the purest of all and the strongest. Maybe not always but lets talk about majority of times.

A relation with father is of a different dimension, it is supposed to be fact oriented and a father will try to give security, goods of life… basically the outer things. And he will also come to you, talk about handling life, about rising up and taking control of things in our lives, about how to handle the people, the needs, the finances etc.

A mother’s relation is more emotion oriented. She may not answer how to tackle the guy who is troubling you, but will ask you about how you are feeling, empathize with you, call that guy names and curse him! Even if you are wrong, she may fight for you  and refuse to believe the wrongness, even questioning it.

I was wading through the net for some Mother’s Day Ads, ideally these should be the branding ones as such a topic will help in making an emotional connect with the customer, not a factual connect. Hence it would go for a product or service that has already a brand value or the one which has right packaging.

Now this is a lovely ad by Zales, a US diamond store. The ‘Mom Rocks’ campaign duly associates the rock word with a diamond and suggests one to gift diamonds to one’s mother.

That was the best as per me, here are the others. Nice watching!

Sear’s commercial

Insane.. just plain insane…!

Picture this, you are just strolling around in the supermarket and stumble upon a grey sweat shirt. Just a plain sweatshirt in a plain Grey color that you can find in any nook and corner of downtowns in winter. You leisurely pull the price tag and see this:

That is right, this plain sweat is worth 2.765Billion dollars!

In case you are still with me, and have not fainted, let me explain the horror. It is the Zimbabwean dollar being talked about, the nation that has seen the largest ever hyper inflation ever where the worth of a currency note is less the cost of making such a note. In February last year, the annual inflation rose to more than 100,000 percent and the local currency tumbled to a record low of 25 million Zimbabwe dollars to one US dollar.

Reason for hyperinflation
If you ask me, its mediocrity itself on part of government thinking. The Central Bank prints too much money to pay for government expenditures. When the government notices prices are rising, it responds by issuing even more money. And this goes on till the money revolving in economy is so much that one ends up paying 3 billion for a sweat shirt!

Problem is not just with prices, its also with the amount of notes you need to buy things. So bank needs to print the currency of higher denomination and that is how Zimbabwe has come out with currency notes of 1 million, 10 million, 500 million, 1 billion and so on. You would expect some monetary and fiscal reforms to correct this, but instead the policy that Zimbabwe government came out with was that in August 2008 the Central Bank of Zimbabwe introduced a new currency slashing all zeroes. But as the right demon was not encountered, two months later they were back at 10,000 notes and it won’t be long before the old notes may be re-used. It was reported that annual inflation reached 231 million percent in July last year.

So how does it look like now?
Bad.. real bad! See this, you can not carry a plastic card for transaction to most of the places, so you need cash, and hell lot of cash!! Just wads and wads of cash! See the images below:

The million dollar baby

The billion dollar baby - who says money does not bring happiness? See this! You would end up laughing!!

What? No body is looting this kid?

Do not mis jusge this guy, he is just going to supermarket to buy vegetables

Time to pay the bill, open the almirah!

The new currency notes - these have last 10 zeros removed and stones signfy the heaviness

But who will tell them that the inflation has not stopped. So here we are, this is what we get to buy from new notes

Back to square one - bank had to start issuing 50K notes again and before its too late, we will again have the one billion dollar note coming back to life

Why? Why ? Why the hell Mr. Mugambe ?!!!

Who knows the brand the best? The brand manager? The guy who is managing sales through distribution channels? or the one who is not at all part of company – the consumer?

There have been cases that a big brand was forced to take back a change just because the consumer was not happy with the new offering. And mind it, when a brand has made its mark, it sure does a lot of research before launching the change in market as a perfect brand is made by hearts, by emotions and they get disturbed easier than a brain ofcourse!

Tropicana New packaging

Recently PepsiCo found it in Tropicana the hard way, almost 24 years after Coke learned it through New Coke. The PepsiCo Americas Beverages division of PepsiCo is bowing to public demand and scrapping the changes made to a flagship product, Tropicana Pure Premium orange juice. Redesigned packaging that was introduced in early January is being discontinued, and the previous version is being brought back.

Also returning will be the longtime Tropicana brand symbol, an orange from which a straw protrudes. The symbol, meant to evoke juice’s fresh taste, had been supplanted on the new packages by a glass of orange juice and an orange-colored twist cap atop large cartons that is shaped like a halved orange.

Some of those commenting described the new packaging as “ugly” or “stupid,” and resembling “a generic bargain brand” or a “store brand.” This is what undersconsideration had to say about the brand – “This new packaging feels, at best, like a discount store brand with what looks like, again, at best, rights-managed stock photography if not outright royalty free. And the typography is, once more, at best, a lame derivative of how the British have lately exploited geometric sans serifs like Futura and Avenir to great results—here’s just one example of many.”

Tropicana Old packaging

But what is starking here is the role of Web2.0 means in these marketing effects. While it took months for Coke to understand that its new Coke taste was a flop, PepsiCo came to know about it in matter of days, thanks to blogging, twitter tweets, facebook and hate mail forwards on these channels. This November, many consumers used Twitter to criticize an ad for Motrin pain reliever and received responses within 48 hours from the brand’s maker, a unit of Johnson & Johnson, which apologized for the ad and told them it had been withdrawn!

Lesson for marketers? The same old one – brands rest in minds of people and not with the one who make the product/service.

Addendum
If you think it was only Tropicana packaging that PepsiCo tampered with in this tough time of recession, here is a food for thought, they even changed the packaging for Pepsi itself! And its not just the style of bottles or new funky colors, but they were bold enough to play around with the logo, in , I repeat, this tough time of recession!! Here are the visuals of what these guys did to a pretty neat brand…

New Pepsi Bottles

A fine hue of capitalist color palette was seen in a surprising and unusual cause-marketing push by KFC. It offered to help in tackling the pothole problem in Louisville, Ky. in exchange for stamping the fresh pavement with “Re-freshed by KFC,” in a chalky stencil.

Col Sanders filling potholes

“This program is a perfect example of that rare and optimal occurrence when a company can creatively market itself and help local governments and everyday Americans across the country,” said Javier Benito, exec VP-marketing and food innovation at KFC. Louisville Mayor Jerry Abramson noted in a statement that budgets are tight for cities across the country, and finding funding for road repairs is a dirty job. “It’s great to have a concerned corporation like KFC create innovative private/public partnerships like this pothole refresh program.”

The KFC program appears to be part of a growing body of consumer-service marketing that connects in a meaningful way. This past holiday season, Charmin provided a public restroom in Times Square for the third year running. The company has also developed an application for iPhone and BlackBerry that helps consumers find toilets when the need arises. Samsung has installed electrical charging stations in many major airports to help travelers stay connected while in limbo.

Creating goodwill
KFC has for long been accused by animal rights people of using inhuman ways to kill chicken or using modified chicken for prepration, am not sure if these accusations are correct or not but they dont help the brand in any good way. Filling potholes may not entice people to wat more KFC chicken burgers but surely can create a goowill and hence increasing sales, decressing guilt inside consumers filling the potholes of KFC’s reputation.

More from: Adage

Every other weekend when I check the ever growing internet for new startups, its surprising to see the new ideas which have come from different black corners. One of these startups I have seen growing in front of me where I know personally the three musketeers who have created it is Fachak.com

Fachak

Lets talk about the idea of this startup first. Fachak.com has rolled out what it calls as the “independent ‘format-neutral’ & ‘multi-source’ content sharing platform”. Fachak allows one to share content of various formats like DOC, Videos, JPEG, PNG, PDF and PPT etc. Its USP lies in enabling users to not only share the data by uploading it at Fachak servers but also sharing the content from other famous content shating sites like YouTube, Slideshare and Scribd. So in case you already have some file uploaded in YouTube by yourself or someone else, you can embed that in Fachak and share with Fachak’s community. Its a clever feature as a typical user may share his presentations from Slideshare, videos from YouTube and Images from Flickr over here in one consolidated profile page. But the revenue doesnt come from the content per se, revenue for these host – YouTube, Slideshare etc come from the UI in which they show this content. So in the end Fachak saves upon the server space and cost as content is coming from other website’s server while it gains the revenue as UI is of Fachak! Pretty neat!

For a social sharing site the flow of pipeline is very important. People should keep sharing the stuff and people should keep viewing the stuff, any one of this dries up, the site may go in for a toss. So how is this site faring? I logged in today and saw this message “Your last log in was Mar 6th, 21:46. There are 8640 entities since your last login”. Boy! That is a huge number now!

And just to emphasize the fact that it is promising enough, check these stats by WebSite Outlook

Net Worth :  $15395.7
Daily Pageview : 6451
Daily Ads Revenue : $21.09 ( This has been rising and was $15 just 2 weeks back!)
Backlinks : 2051
Google Page Rank : 3

The website is in alpha right now and have been adding features, improving them and becoming more mature. The entry is by invitation, but the views are for free. I have invites available , so in case you want it just leave a comment mentioning same.

I dont know for how long Gmail will be in beta but anyway they are coming up with more and more features in this almost decade old application. Apart from new additions that you see in the mailbox, you can also check the features in the pipeline, the beta of the beta version, one where Google Lab is still working.

Two days back Google Labs launched another feature to Gmail users – Multiple Inboxes. There are people who have different accounts in gmail for different ‘categories’ and demarcation ; while there are others who use another account which is running on Google Apps (i.e. Google allows use of Gmail as your domain name mailbox). FYI, I belong to latter group.

Using this experimental feature in Gmail Labs, one can customize the different “inboxes” to see them in one view when one logs into Gmail. See the image example below:

To turn the feature on, follow these three simple steps:

1. Turn on Multiple Inboxes from the Labs tab under Settings.
2. Set up a filter to auto-archive all mail sent to your work or other address.
3. Customize one of your multiple inboxes to show mail sent to your other address. To do this, go to the Multiple Inboxes tab under Settings and set up one of the panes to search for mail sent to your other address.

Tagged and starred emails can be displayed alongside the main inbox, making more emails visible at the same time.  Since many people use their email to manage their to-do list, it’s a well-chosen feature on the part of the Gmail Labs crew!

Psst..! Did you notice?

You may have also noticed a new design of buttons in Gmail. Designer Douglas Bowman says, “The buttons are designed to look very similar to basic HTML input buttons.  But they can handle multiple interactions with one basic design.  The buttons we’re using are imageless, and they’re created entirely using HTML and CSS, plus some JavaScript to manage the behavior.  They’re also easily skinnable with a few lines of CSS, which was a key factor now that Gmail has themes.”

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