Zomato's ad entry draws inspiration from Fevikwik's 'fishing' ad

Earlier this month, Zomato had announced a contest with prize money worth Rs. 25 lakhs and invited users to create ad films for the. To qualify, the ads had to be funny and less than a minute long. Winners will get Rs 25 lakhs, get featured on YouTube and TV.

Zomato has begun uploading the entries to their YouTube page and one of the ads that caught our eye was one that had a theme of 'fishing.'

Look familiar? This ad seems to have taken inspiration from Ogilvy's work for Pidilite's product fevikwik.

The ad was written by Piyush Pandey and in an episode of Season 4 of Netflix’s show ‘The Creative Indian’, he shares the backstory to Fevikwik’s famous fishing ad. After writing the commercial and before approaching the client, Pandey asked his team to bring him a pencil, a coin, a glass of water and a tube of Fevikwik.

He dropped the coin inside water, added a drop of Fevikwik to the flat end of the pencil and dipped the pencil into the water in a bid to retrieve the coin.

“My team asked me, what was the need to do this? I told them – there will be one guy who gets up in the meeting and says ‘our product doesn’t stick underwater’. When he did, I dipped the pencil inside, brought it up with the coin sticking to it and I told them – ‘it does’,” recalls Pandey.

Other entries to the contest include references to Zomato as a personal chef, an initiative to share food with the delivery boy. Other storylines included a cooking experiment gone wrong, a mission to deliver food to a student living in a boys hostel and a rap song thanking Zomato for serving good food in a lockdown.