The latest ad for sealant brand M-Seal compensates for low spends and low category involvement by cleverly dramatizing the potential damage leakages can cause.
What does one do to advertise a dull, boring product that goes under the category name ‘epoxy putty sealant'? A product used by plumbers, mechanics, masons and carpenters to seal things like overhead tanks, flush tanks, window panes, pipelines and other none-too-fancy things?
And how does one advertise a brand with as uninspiring and ‘technical' a name as M-Seal?
The predictable would have been showing water dribbling in the bathroom. Wife nags husband to fix leak, clumsy hubby gets a soaking, bolt-of-lightning from the skies and M-Seal is teleported into living room. Leak fixed, family gathers for group photo… Ta-daa!
Now here's the M-Seal ad, in brief. Old man is on his deathbed. Doleful relatives stand around the bed in silence as the lawyer draws up the final testament. The lawyer passes the will around among the relatives, each one gently accepting the dying man's bequeathal. The will reaches one of the old man's sons (brilliantly essayed by Manoj Pahwa), who is a tad unhappy with the Rs 1,000 he has inherited. The son pushes his way to the old man's side and begs him to add a zero to the figure. The father resists, but eventually gives in. Pushing his luck, the son quickly cajoles his anguished father to add a couple of more zeros, much to the disgust of everyone gathered.
Having got his way, the son dumps the father, smiles proudly, and takes the will towards another room with the intention of gloating over his new found wealth. However, as he stops at the doorway, a drop of water from a leak overhead falls on the will, smudging the ‘one' at the beginning of the figure. As he hears the sound of wailing behind him, he stares in horror at the six blank zeros staring back at him. "Sirf ek tapakti boond aapki kismat badal sakti hai. Ghar mein rakhiye, M-Seal. Hamesha," (Just one drop of water can change your fortune. Keep M-Seal at home. Always.) warns the voiceover.
The ad's simplicity and humour are bang-on, and the brand message comes across lucidly. And the one area where the ad scores highest is ‘repeat value' - perhaps the best measure of an ad's likeability.
"A leak is one of the most ignored things in any household, yet the potential damage it can cause is huge," points out Kumar Subramaniam, client services director, O&M. "The idea here is to dramatize that damage." Piyush Pandey, group president & national creative director, O&M, adds, "The brand has huge awareness. All we had to do was make a memorable statement, considering sealant is a low-interest category and spends were low. I must give due credit to Abhijit (Avasti). When I conceived the ad, I was thinking of dropping the water on the old man's signature, but Abhijit suggested dropping it on the ‘one'. And that was poetic justice… after all, the son was the one who was squeezing the old man, not the other relatives."
"While it was important to drive home the brand's advantage, the long-term vision is to straddle the category," says Subramaniam. "The communication had to appropriate the category." That, of course, is a job almost done. Acquired by Pidilite Industries from the Mahindras in April 2000, M-Seal dominates the Rs 25-crore epoxy sealant market, with a share of Rs 18 crore. Competition comes in the form of numerous spurious brands (mostly regional), and Beck Seal, on the national level. Incidentally, Pidilite's epoxy putty brand, Feviseal, is being phased out, and its variants are being brought under the M-Seal brand name.
With M-Seal riding the category, why the need for an ad? One, M-Seal had been out of mass media for the last couple of years. "When the brand becomes the category and is left unattended, the line between the category and the brand blurs," points out Subramaniam. "The consumer doesn't see the ad, so he starts accepting brands that the dealer pushes. Rivals start taking volumes, you slip, and soon you cannot command a premium as a brand."
The ad campaign, which has a budget of Rs 75 lakh, also has market development in sight - taking M-Seal beyond the ‘industrial' segment into the ‘household' segment.
Agency : O&M, Mumbai
The Team:
Creative : Piyush Pandey, Abhijit Avasti
Servicing : Kumar Subramaniam, Albert Pereira, Rahul Sethi
Filmmaker : Prasoon Pandey
Production House : Highlight Films
Models : Manoj Pahwa (son), Honey Irani (father)
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