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D’Cold Total’s new campaign expands its consumer base. Earlier, it was an old man, but now it’s a bunch of youngsters. What’s interesting is the way the message is packaged
Gone are the days when an advertisement for a medical product had to feature a protagonist sneezing or coughing for 30 seconds and then treating the viewers to a long lecture on his condition. The television commercial for Paras Pharmaceuticals’ D’Cold Total spares the consumer the education and takes the unusual route of infotainment, thanks to Mudra Communications.
Mudra has created a series of three ads for D’Cold Total to convey the message without preaching. Jignesh Shah, GM, marketing, Paras Pharmaceuticals, says this is an attempt to tackle two problems – people’s perception of cough and cold remedies in the form of tablets as opposed to syrups and the lack of top-of-the-mind recall for D’Cold Total.
A nervous looking guy hanging on to a cliff. |
Another guy hanging behind the first one, looks on in amazement. |
The third guy, unsure of what will happen, looks above. |
The cold-struck guy pulling the rope sneezes and the untoward happens. |
He looks on in despair, as his friends have a fall. |
“Keeping these factors in mind, we wanted Mudra to create clutter-breaking advertisements to change the mindset of consumers and also convey the four benefits of D’Cold Total in an interesting manner,” says Shah. The result is this campaign that projects D’Cold Total in an unconventional set-up.
The ad shows four young men desperately holding on to a rope hanging over a cliff. The voice-over in the background says that none of them exhibit the symptoms of a cold. As it lists the four common symptoms, the terror-stricken eyes of the four are fixed upon the lean man who is anchoring the rope on the cliff-top. The reason: he is about to sneeze.
As he opens his mouth to sneeze, the screen blacks out and the screams of the falling men are heard. The culprit, or rather, the victim of the cold, looks on in shock. The sign-off line says, “D’Cold Total, Yaad rahega na?”
Talking about the creative strategy, Vipin Dhyani, creative director, Mudra, Ahmedabad, says, “We wanted to avoid conventional verbose communication, but still wanted to encapsulate all the benefits of the product. The task was to weave this into a storyline in an amusing way.”
Shot in the scenic Khandala-Lonavala stretch, the ad was directed by Kunal Shivdasani of Virtual Reality Productions. Two more ads with a similar treatment will go on air this week, completing the series.
The earlier commercial for D’Cold Total showed an ill man in his office. While that targeted office-goers, the new strategy aims at widening the audience spectrum and grabbing eyeballs.
“We want people to talk about the ad and smile at the end of it”, Dhyani says. Let’s hope the consumer doesn’t give the communication a ‘cold shoulder’.
© 2007 agencyfaqs!