<FONT COLOR="#FF0033"><B>Guest Article:</B></FONT> Cross-branding: What should it do?

Saw John Abraham saying “Hot date paane ke liye chahiye, cool baal aur cool bike” – Clinic All Clear and Yamaha. Great thought and nicely executed

Gaurav Srivastava

Hungama – India FM

August 8

Saw John Abraham saying “Hot date paane ke liye chahiye, cool baal aur cool bike” – Clinic All Clear and Yamaha. Great thought and nicely executed. This, in a long time, is the first true cross-branded initiative that I have seen. Both the brands were properly represented, drew equal attention and, hence, have equal recall.

This is what the purpose of a cross- branding exercise is – benefit to both the players. Essentially, this may not be in terms of visibility, but in terms of driving benefits from the association, which brings me to the point of discussing what the cross-branded initiatives between a Hindi movie and a brand do.

It is a short journey that entertainment marketing has been through till now if one looks at other modes of marketing and promotion. In this short period, the audience has been exposed to a number of cross-branding tie-ups between films and brands that have been agreed upon in the following manner:

1.The brand picks out a couple of sequences from the movie.

2.Mixes the same with its current TVC.

3.Presents this ‘khichdi’ to the audience, saying ‘brand’ presents ‘movie’.

The same is done with the print and outdoor campaign. To better the bargain, in the name of user involvement, a contest is announced around the movie and the winners get gratification from the brand for giving the right answer. This has caught the imagination of brand managers, who are running after the big budget/banner movies for such tie-ups. The production houses are only too happy to share some impressive sequences of their movie for publicity, which can range in cost from Rs 50 lakhs to Rs 1 crore.

The question that concerns me is, do the brands get the expected mileage (visibility) from a tie-up like this. Let’s do a little analysis of the situation.

1.The decision to tie up with a movie is taken by the brand manager, who, sometimes, unfortunately, is busy impressing his superiors.

2.The easy way to do that is tie up with a big banner/budget movie, which has an impressive star cast.

3.With only 15-20 big budget/banner movies hitting the screen every year, the choice becomes restricted.

4.Result: We have eight-ten brands pitching for tie-ups with one movie and four-five finally managing to do it.

5.What does the brand get for shelling out money on the so-called cross-promos? A couple of sequences each from the movie, which are anyway running as promos on etc, MTV and Channel .

6.Finally, no matter what the brand does, what we have are repeat telecasts of the entertainment spots, with brand logo attached or a hoarding with the brand logo in the bottom 10 per cent space.

7.So, as soon as the ad is over or you have passed a hoarding, no matter how hard you try, you cannot place the brand logo you saw on the ‘movie spot’ or the ‘movie hoarding’.

My sympathies to all such brand tie-ups; they are more tools of ego satisfaction than a ‘planned promotional step’.

What I have been waiting to see all this while is the ‘protagonist’ of the movie delivering the brand message. To make myself more clear here – the idea is not that the star of the movie would endorse the product, but that the ‘character’ would. Which means the agencies doing the tie-ups would have to work a bit harder.

For now, the cross-promos are made on the editing table. The request here is to take it to the table of the script writer and the director of the movie. A situation where the creative director for the brand and the director of the movie would sit together to brainstorm on how to deliver the brand message in the cross-promo and still retain the spirit of the movie, such that we have the characters of the movie doing what they do in the movie and yet sending the brand message across.

To make this industry grow, we will have to move over from taking big budget movies to ‘brand fit’ ones – from creating 25+5 second spots to creating an integrated promo. All this is on the cards and I have faith that it’s just a matter of time before we graduate to doing the more mature stuff.

(The writer is manager, entertainment marketing, with Hungama–India FM. You can write to him at

gauravs@indiafm.com)

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