The BTS of Milk Bikis’ OOH trip across the Tamil heartland

Tamil Nadu is the biggest milk biscuit market in India. As per a report by The Hindu, the state accounts for half of the country’s milk biscuit market, at an estimated Rs 1,000 crore. 

FMCG giant Britannia Industries has had a tight grip on this market for a long time. Amit Doshi, CMO, Britannia, recently said that one in five biscuits bought in the state is the company’s ‘Milk Bikis’. 

The competition for Britannia is heating up in Tamil Nadu with new players like ITC's Sunfeast entering the market. Britannia, on the occasion of Tamil Nadu Day, then recently embarked on a journey inside the Tamil heartland to develop its latest hyperlocal Milk Bikis campaign, titled ‘Anaivarukkum’. It translates to ‘for everyone’.

The campaign was brought to life by the creative agency Talented. The agency’s creatives Samyu Murali and Balaji P. led the campaign’s development. The campaign includes five videos and is visible on around 70 billboards across the state. The campaign was also present on Print newspapers across the state.

Murali, who hails from Mylapore locality in Chennai, shares that the biscuit was an important part of her childhood. It has been a constant in the lives of people across the state, she adds. However, there are multiple subcultures within the state and Milk Bikis is one common thread that connects the state.

“I feel that (media) communication about any region in South India often gets generalised. Cliches and stereotypes about the region exist because of this generalisation. Further, you can often see campaigns being translated from different languages to a local language without adding any specific insights or narrative relevant to a particular culture. One way to correct this is to understand the culture by going deeper into the region when executing a hyperlocal campaign,” Samyu asserts.

During their research, the Talented team figured out that the campaign can truly be hyperlocal in the state if they take the pin code approach, rather than a city to city approach.

The team discovered that there are slight variations in the Tamil dialect spoken every 15-20 km. Samyu observes that people can recognise the area one is from on the basis of the kind of Tamil they speak.

The campaign was devised in a way that the messaging behind the OOHs, as well as the digital films, is in area specific dialects and appeal to particular subcultures within the state. 

All these creatives tie back to a central idea behind ‘Anaivarukkum’. To formulate this, the agency looked at theater and films, the other connecting threads in the state, to come up with the idea. ‘Aathi Parasakthi’ is a 1971 Tamil mythological film.

It is an age-old classic with which a large majority of the local population is familiar with. There’s a very popular dialogue in the film, ‘Shakti Illamal Shivan Illai’. It translates to ‘There is no Shiva without Shakti and without Shiva, there is nothing’. 

“The biscuit has ‘Britannia’ inscribed on it. Our initial thought was that without ‘T’ and ‘N’, which is Tamil Nadu’s abbreviation, you can’t spell Britannia. The team then had this idea of fusing this thought with the famous (‘Aathi Parasakthi’) dialogue,” Murali informs.

To gain a better grasp of the local pulse of Tamil Nadu, the team reached out to locals, their relatives, or internet friends, to figure out different nuances of different districts.

After discovering things that stand out in each district, like the banana chips of Makarpura or the locks of Dindigul, the core theme was altered to better target particular localities in the OOHs. So, for Chennai, the OOH reads, ‘Without Marina Beach, there is no Chennai. Without TN, there’s no Britannia.’

The team then decided on billboard locations across the state. Preference was given to the billboards that were available for ‘Tamil Nadu Day’, i.e., July 18.

They then checked whether the OOH locations has a high footfall. Samyu says that extensive research was required to identify these spots in smaller towns. 

“A lot of work in media buying was facilitated by the Britannia team. We were looking at different spots in which our billboards would be widely seen but also the subcultural nuances that our copies focus on would be relevant.”

The differences in the local dialects were also highlighted in five ad films. These films were released in 15 local dialects. The differences in the dialects were also highlighted by Britannia when it released the films on its social media handles.

The films feature the different roles that the biscuit holds in the lives of a grandmother, a grandfather, a couple, a middle aged man called ‘Uncle Alex’, and a kid. Local dialects from areas like: Thanjavur, Sowcarpet, Salem, Tirunelveli, Tiruvannamalai, Thoothukudi, Mylapore, Madurai, Urban Chennai, can be heard in the films' voiceover.

Over the years, Britannia has released a lot of communications for Milk Bikis specific toTamil Nadu. The biscuit used to earlier come in two variants in the state.

Along with the original biscuit, there was also a ‘Classic’ variant which was discontinued later. It was popular with the generation of consumers growing up in the 80s.

The company recently re-launched the 'Classic' biscuit with its original design: a flowery crease and a Britannia logo inscribed in the center of the biscuit.

Talented's first Tamil Nadu focused campaign for Milk Bikis was around the Classic relaunch. Popular Tamilian nicknames from the 80s and 90s were inscribed in the middle of these biscuits.

Names like Usharu, which means alert; Peter, someone who uses a lot of English when they speak, and Narada, a person who indulges in gossip like the sage Narada does, made an appearance in the campaign that came out three months ago.