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    There’s something about Maggi, Pepsi & Nike, says Team JWT

    Synopsis

    The JWT team sits back and chalk out the best campaign for conceived by the agency; the campaign are as varied from brands like Nike to Malayala Manorama.

    ET Bureau
    Swati Bhattacharya National Creative Director, JWT

    This office has given birth to everything from Maggi to Horlicks to Slice and 7Up. But if we are to choose campaigns that have become a milestone, I’d go with:

    Maggi: The first big campaign for Maggi hot and sweet tomato chilli sauce — it’s different. I started my career with that campaign. One of my big responsibilities was to hound Javed Jaffrey since the scripts were always co-written. It was a brand for the housewife and yet they went with that humour and knew housewives would get it. These days, people are not brave enough to sell anything to housewives; they’d never use a smuggler or an underworld icon to sell ketchup. Even when the brand went to Publicis after realignment, they did a lot of work with Javed. It was an enduring campaign that ran for 10 to 15 years.

    Pepsi: The 'Nothing Official About It' campaign changed the game with just one line. Obviously Coke had the official rights but the Cup belonged to Pepsi in spite of Coke having spent so much money. It was the first time cricket was harnessed as a youth voice icon. It showed India how cricket could be treated with irreverence and humour, long before the IPL.

    Senthil Kumar National Creative Director, JWT

    Nike: Over the years, we’ve united the nation with different expressions around the brand. From the traffic signal ad to 'Bleed Blue' to 'Parallel Journeys' and most recently 'Make Every Yard Count', the work has made JWT respected among its peers within the network and in the industry at large. 'Bleed Blue' was an idea whose time had come. The Nike page had 300,000 fans on social media and after the campaign, it stood at 2.5 million. While still sticking to cricket, the brand has something new to say each time. Globally, the work evokes the desire to get out and play. I think we’ve succeeded in influencing that decision among young people in the country.

    The Times of India Chennai and Kerala: Our campaign took newspapers with so much history like The Hindu in Chennai and Malayala Manorama in Kerala, head on. We tugged at the hearts of the locals in the local language. The Hindu had to respond, both with changes to the format of the newspaper and by coming up with campaigns. The campaign resulted in the Chennai office being seen in a totally different way and put it on the world map.

    Tista Sen National Creative Director, JWT
    Birla Sunlife: In the insurance category, the strategy is usually doom and gloom. We tried a completely different approach, using the vulnerability of cricketers who are usually full of machismo. In our commercials, they talked about how fame and adulation is so fleeting. It was a powerful insight: the guys at the top of the charts saying ‘this is fantastic but it could all be gone tomorrow.’ We used Yuvraj Singh as campaign ambassador and he became the face of it as he went through a personal tragedy that he conquered. We picked a few awards but what was more important was provoking people to think differently.

    ( Originally published on Sep 10, 2014 )
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