A brand ambassador to change Idea’s life

Telecom service provider Idea has unleashed its first-ever commercial with actor Abhishek Bachchan as endorser. The company and its agency, Lowe, are hoping to reinvent the brand with this effort

With his recent box-office successes and his much publicised celebrity wedding, actor Abhishek Bachchan has been quite in demand of late in the advertising circuit. After LG, Big FM and Motorola, telecom operator Idea is the latest brand now to want to leverage the actor’s cool quotient.

In its 12 years of existence, this is the first time Idea has appointed a brand ambassador. According to Nikhil Rao, group creative director, Lowe, Idea had gone without a brand ambassador for too long. Competing service providers Hutch, Airtel and Tata Indicom had raced ahead in this department, having used different celebrities at various points. “So, it was a matter of time before we caught up and decided to give it a shot,” says Rao. Lowe is the agency working on the Idea account.

Thus began the hunt for a celebrity. Idea’s brand qualities – youthfulness, spunk, energy, irreverence, smartness and intelligence – were found to be the same as those espoused in Bachchan’s screen persona. The brief from the client was rather open-ended. Lowe was encouraged to reinvent the brand, taking off from the last thematic campaign in 2006, ‘Monkey’, which leveraged significantly on the Idea tune. Lowe had a good thing going already with the premise, ‘An idea can change your life’, but it was now time to explore the ‘whys’ and ‘hows’ behind that premise. “Ideas can change history; they can change people,” says Rao, enunciating the thought that formed the core basis for the new Idea commercial.

The ad opens on the stark shot of a communal riot in full swing, with each party armed and ready to attack its opponents. People run for their lives on deserted streets, while the doors to houses and shops are slammed shut. Angry voices, beatings, and a shot of a burnt slipper belonging to a presumably dead man, complete the ghastly scene.

The matter is then taken to a village panchayat, where the opponents blame each other for the violence. Just then, the village ‘sarpanch’ (Bachchan) gets a call on his Idea phone. He is struck by a solution to the dispute – he announces that from now on, no one will be known by their name (symbolising caste). Each person will use only his mobile number as his name. This resolves the fight. The two camps now address each other by their mobile numbers. Nameplates, election campaigns and even road signs are all marked by mobile numbers instead of names. A fitting end has Bachchan’s sidekick telling him, “What an Idea, Sirji!” And on comes the Idea logo and tagline, ‘An Idea can change your life’.

Obviously the ‘solution’ to this menace in society is not a practical/literal one; it is just one rendition of the brand’s point of view. Rao explains, “The idea could take on any role – something that can help overcome/bypass/simplify things, for instance.”

The film, shot by Chrome Pictures, has ‘filmi’ elements in it, such as the burnt slipper in the riot sequence, to add to the drama.

From now on, all Idea communication will end with the thought, ‘What an Idea’, in addition to the brand’s main tagline.