The campaign film. Hindi, with the shopkeeper's own name spoken by Shah Rukh Khan.
Diwali is the season small retailers live or die on, and in 2021 the small ones were losing it to lockdowns and to online. A brand that sells through those shops does not have a communications problem, it has a distribution problem wearing a communications costume.
Let every corner shop in India make its own Shah Rukh Khan ad, with its own name in his mouth.
The Stupid/Smart of it
Stupid: Take the most valuable and most tightly controlled asset you have, the face and voice of a global film star, and hand the controls to strangers. Let a machine put words in his mouth that nobody at the agency or the client has read.
Smart: Generosity that is also distribution. Every shopkeeper who made an ad became an advocate at the exact point where the gifting decision happens, and shared it themselves, for free, because it was their name on it.
The steal: find the thing your business genuinely depends on that nobody else is looking after, and look after it in public. Not a cause you picked from a list, the one already load-bearing in your own supply chain.
It is the rare good deed a finance director can also sign off on, which is why it won a Titanium Lion and then a Creative Effectiveness Grand Prix two years later.
A shopkeeper hearing a film star say the name above his own door. The technology is impressive; the thing that lands is the name.
Act-poweredIt works because the ads were really made, by real shops. Has to be seen to work.
The devices behind this one, from our library of ways in: