Mid-Day revamps its Sunday edition

A morning daily Indian compact newspaper, Mid-Day has revamped the content of its Sunday edition. In a new campaign, the Mumbai-headquartered newspaper addresses the city saying, 'Hey Mumbai, we have a Sunday for you'.

Conceptualised and created by Scarecrow M&C Saatchi, the campaign runs on the tagline '70% Features. 30% News. 100 % Mumbai’. The campaign includes a series of 10 full page print ads that feature various archetypes including a foodie, a musician, a photographer, among others — all in an attempt to represent the different walks of Mumbai life.

Scarecrow M&C Saatchi has also penned down a song, in a bid to give the campaign a longer life. The song has been composed by Rupert Fernandes — known for his 'you and I in this beautiful world' tune for Vodafone. Donning the country genre, the song has vocals by Neuman Pinto.

Commenting on the campaign, Tinaz Nooshian, editor-in-chief, Mid-Day Infomedia, said, "Sunday Mid-Day is traditionally known for its curated ideas and quality of writing. The thrust is on leisure reading and hand-picked feature articles spanning everything from pop- and sub-culture, to food and drink, health, heritage revival, fashion and technology, sport, the arts and entertainment. News is of course, our mainstay, and we don't compromise there. So, if this was the only paper you read on Sundays, you still wouldn't miss a thing.”

We reached out to Manish Bhatt, founder and director, Scarecrow M&C Saatchi, to understand what went behind the scenes in producing this campaign.

“Extracting 10 archetypes from 13 million Mumbaikars was a huge task in itself,” Bhatt remarks. “With the help of Mid-Day’s editorial team lead by their editor-in-chief, we could accomplish this task, because they have a fair idea about which type of reader consumes which kind of content,” he explains. Pointing out the necessity of the campaign's relevance, Bhatt says, “We neither wanted to miss out on the psyche of the reader nor the geography… the most important thing was that the ad had to be an interesting read.”

When a city like Mumbai is the theme of a campaign, a lot of clichés are invoked to get the image across. We asked Bhatt about such prevalent clichés in advertisement and how the campaign makes a case for originality. He responds, “When it comes to capturing the essence of Mumbai city, the cliché would have been to show the black and white hustle-bustle of local trains, Crawford market, railway platforms, slums, etc. The central idea of ‘anticipation’ emerged from ours and the client’s fear of showing black and white clichés. But our differentiation in imagery lied in the idea itself, where we had to show Mumbaikars’ anticipation of a relaxed and uncluttered Sunday of Mumbai, which by itself is breaking away from the usual representation of Mumbai.”

Commenting on the inclusion of the song in the campaign and its genre, Bhatt reckons, “After a week full of hustle-bustle, Mumbai’s Sunday could be best represented with a relaxed and laid-back mood. Hence, we thought that the guitar plucks and harmonica of country genre would capture it better.”

Here are some of the pictures from the campaign