In the highly competitive mobile handset market, it has become imperative to promote every feature in an innovative way to break through the clutter. W595, the latest phone from the Sony Erickson stable, enables sharing its music experience. This feature has been highlighted in the latest ad, conceptualised by Saatchi & Saatchi.
Old School Films is the production house with Shiven Surendranath as the Director. Nandu Narasimhan is the ECD for the campaign. The TVC broke on all major channels recently and the first phase of the campaign would be on air for eight weeks.
Narasimhan said, “The client brief was simple enough, and yet if we delved deeper, very challenging. The product had a clear delivery – a music experience which enabled sharing. The challenge was that sharing was an often treaded upon space. Bringing out a unique aspect or finding a genuine human behavioural truth associated with sharing had to be brought alive.”
He continued, “The campaign’s objective was to get across the message that here is a phone that sits in a very competitive price bracket with multiple competitor models straddling it. The campaign is appealing to the upwardly mobile youth of today, who value their music, and thus create saliency for the model within this target group. In addition, a secondary objective was to add to the equity that Walkman already has with the youth. Walkman phones from Sony Ericsson have always delivered a superior music experience and past introductions have already added to this aura. This campaign also manages to further that strong equity.”
“The film is based around the insight that when two people listen to a piece of music they both like, it brings them together at a far deeper level than is apparent to a third person, so to speak. Creatively, we decided to take this ‘coming together’ as a cue and the subsequent interpretation that two people listening to a piece of music they like appear to be the clone or twin of each other just fell into place,” added Narasimhan.
He further explained, “Choosing the cast was a difficult exercise to say the least. We did not want to go the trite way of choosing the character and replicating on chroma. The effort was to find natural twins who looked good on screen. And the value this effort added is apparent. While the cast was key, the locations were also chosen to add to the visual drama. It was shot in part in Mumbai, where sets were made, to spectacular locales around Nashik, with the Sahyadari hills as a backdrop.”
“The creative idea is being taken to other media, especially web, on-ground and radio. The TVC was a pure visual idea; it may be interpreted slightly differently keeping in mind the needs of the medium. While the web activation would start with the TVC, the on-ground and radio activation would follow in a few weeks’ time to capitalise on the build-up given by the TVC,” Narasimhan added.
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