Cadbury Éclair Crunch: Slow and steady wins the race

In the ad for Cadbury Éclair Crunch, Contract Advertising strikes the retro note that is so popular nowadays by borrowing a clichéd romantic scene from Hindi cinema

The new Cadbury Éclair Crunch TVC is one more example of the ad industry’s obsession with Bollywood clichés. Obviously, the recently released film, Om Shanti Om (OSO), has brought retro right into the spotlight.

The new TVC (television commercial) borrows from Hindi cinema of the 1970s (just like OSO), where the hero and heroine would run around trees and dally in flower gardens during a romantic sequence. However, executives at Contract and Cadbury India declare the ad has nothing to do with Om Shanti Om, and the 1970s look was an execution route finalised much before the film’s release.

To put things into perspective, the Éclair Crunch was launched in July 2006, with a TVC (Ek Nahin, Do Do) to raise awareness about the Éclair now having another variant. The ad, which was aired for nine months, had a woman asking for directions to the principal’s office in a college and a man trying to act smart with her. She gives it back to him after eating an Éclair. Says Yogesh Anand, associate vice-president, candy and gums, Cadbury India, “While that ad helped establish awareness about this new, hard, caramel covered variant, we were now faced with the task of highlighting the consumption experience.”

As the Éclair Crunch has a hard covering (unlike the chewy regular Eclair), Cadbury conducted research and found out that consumers like to suck a sweet for a long time to enjoy it. “We asked Contract to bring this forth,” explains Anand.

The ad opens on the shot of a 1970s hero, Raja (Swapnil Joshi), calling out loudly to his girlfriend Priya in a field full of sunflowers. Priya calls out to him just as loudly. Raja turns around and, rather emotionally, the two start running towards each other. The scene turns comical when the couple, having covered significant ground quite quickly, bump messily into each other, instead of falling into an embrace. The voiceover asks the two if they ‘enjoyed’ that. When they reply grumpily that they didn’t, the voiceover becomes the voice of wisdom, offering them advice on how some things are best enjoyed slowly, like the Cadbury Éclair Crunch. As the two suck Éclair Crunches, they manage to embrace each other. The tagline goes, ‘Slow slow, mazein lo’. (Submit your opinion on this ad.)

Raj Nair, vice-president and executive creative director, Contract, says the idea clearly revolves around the thought that some things in life are best enjoyed slowly. The 1970s Bollywood setting was an add-on to make the ad more enjoyable, and “the OSO connection is just a coincidence”, says Nair. To make the ad humorous, the normal, slow motion sequence of the hero and heroine running towards each other, was made out to be a marathon run of sorts, so that the two end up looking comical when they bump into each other.

The ad was shot by Gajaraj Rao of Code Red Films in a small town outside Bangalore. Cinema nuances such as retro costumes and hairdos and an RD Burman-like soundtrack (composed by Bobo) were added for effect. Kartik Smetacek and Arjun Sen have also worked on the campaign.

Anand of Cadbury reveals that a radio contest, Slow Mix Idol, has been launched in association with Radio City, in which listeners have to sing a fast song slowly and yet sound melodious. The best singer will win lots of goodies. This activity will be conducted in Ahmedabad, Mumbai and Delhi; some 40 colleges have also been invited to participate. Next, a school sampling programme has been rolled out in 200 schools across seven cities in North India through a game called Slow Olympics. Here, children have to play a game in the slowest way to win. Distribution of the product in classrooms is a part of the activity. These two additional activities are an obvious attempt to connect with Eclair Crunch’s target group – teenagers and kids.