Fropper: a stranger is a friend

Though Fropper.com has been around for the last few years, it has always had the image of being a dating website. What few people realised was that it was also a destination for social networking.

Fropper.com is now trying to shift its positioning from a dating website to a networking community. The online company hopes that its latest campaign, conceived by Orchard Advertising, will help it meet this objective.

“The previous campaigns launched by Fropper were mainly product or service oriented. We felt that rather than merely promote its services and products, which could be replicated by anyone, Fropper needed to build itself as a brand that was top of the mind with Net users,” says Hemant Kumar Sivan, creative director, Orchard Advertising.

This made sense for the company as the popularity of online networking websites such as Orkut, Hi5 and Myspace has given a new dimension to the category. Secondly, social networking is considered to be more serious than just online dating, thus Fropper would also widen its arena.

The two TVCs put out by Fropper are based on the concept of how two people from entirely different socioeconomic classes can be friends using Fropper. In the ads, the Bihari milkman, Yadav, is no stranger to the Bengali pilot, Debashis, and the Malayali fisherman, Chacko, happens to be a friend of the scuba-diving Balwinder.

The second TVC, titled ‘Parachute’, has the same theme but presents a different situation. Here, a milkman is watching television when a news channel shows a plane crash. The milkman draws the attention of his assistants to the crash. Suddenly, something crashes on the roof of the milkman’s house – someone from the plane that has gone down is shown hanging on to the roof. The milkman recognises the guy and calls him by his name, Debashish, to which he hears his own name called out in return. The super chips in once again.

Sivan of Orchard says, “The portrayal of two contrasting characters was very strategic. We thought it would help us cut a mark.”

The portrayal of the characters has added subtle humour to the commercials. Navin Mittal, business head, Fropper, says, “Our core target group is Net users in the age group of 18-25. To reach out to this segment of consumers, one has to take the humour route, which goes down well with them.”

“While working on this campaign, we thought of several emotions that could be portrayed. We then decided that humour was the right route to reach out to the young,” says Sivan.

“The Internet is considered to be a serious business for serious people, so portraying two well-dressed characters, or showing two friends, Raju and Kaju, would not have made the cut,” he explains.

Besides these two TVCs, the campaign includes two radio spots based on a similar concept.

Shot entirely in Mumbai, the films have been shot by Tuck Box/Bang Bang productions. Binakar Rambhatla worked on the campaign along with Sivan.

© 2007 agencyfaqs!