MTS Mblaze: A Successful Entry

Sorry guys I was not able to blog since long. There were multiple reasons for that. One was the main that is I was not having any high speed internet. Yesterday I bought MTS data card, the speed is good enough and now I will try to be continuous blogger. As I am using MTS so I decided to write on MTS first.

MTS(Mobile TeleSystems) was established in October 1993 by Moscow City Telephone Network (MGTS), T-Mobile Deutschland GmbH (T-Mobile), an affiliate of Deutsche Telekom AG, Siemens AG (Siemens) and several other shareholders. In late 1996, Sistema JSFC acquired a majority stake in MTS and has remained the primary owner ever since.

MTS initiated its international expansion in 2002 through the establishment of Mobile TeleSystems LLC, a joint venture with Beltelecom, the national fixed line operator in Belarus. In December 2008, MTS started to expose its brand outside the CIS borders. MTS and Shyam Telelink Limited, JSFC Sistema's telecommunications subsidiary in India, announces the agreement to allow Shyam Telelink to use MTS brand in India. The decision to introduce the brand to India is reflective of the brand’s success in the Company’s markets of operation since its launch in May 2006. In April 2008, MTS brand was recognized as one of the BRANDZ™ Top 100 Most Powerful Brands, a ranking published by the Financial Times and Millward Brown, a leading global market research and consulting firm.

Reebok Shoes now free with MTS MBlaze

Now look at the branding of MTS in India. MTS endorsed Yuvaraj and Sameera Reddy very smartly in one of its ads. The ad focuses on speed and says to get the DOUBLE DOSE of speed. In order to justify the speed, MTS is giving Reebok shoes free with MTS Mblaze that makes a man faster. What a funny coorelation but it worked for the Brand.

Never Stop…

Nothing can come in your way when you know what you want, the ad dramatically shows that, high speed internet and smart mobile telephony.

Saatchi & Saatchi, the ad agency of MTS tried to make all the ads live. Look at the following ad. The person searches for the Games and plays the games just like as he himself is a player in between. The ad symbolizes the high speed that how a person feels that he himself is a player in between.

Making the things live

MTS did wonderful campaigning in order to capture the market share. Look at the following video and you will find that how MTS did campaigning on Auto Rickshaws in South India. At some places MTS put canopies offering water to the passersby. MTS did mass marketing by targeting the Apartments and Residencies by offering landline phones with CUG facilities and high speed broadband.

Auto campaign in Tamil Nadu

MTS did the successful campaigning and capture the mobile broadband market in a short while. The other advantage it had was that it was roaming free and providing speed better than Reliance connect and Tata Photon even. Except MTS no other network is providing roaming free Broadband. The tariffs of Unlimited Plan and other data usage charges are also convenient enough. So, we can say that MTS stood itself in a short while in the Battles of Advertisements.

Ad-Mania of Superbowl

After a long I am back on blogging and trying to give some variation after finding time from my busy schedule.

It’s a season of Super Bowl so my topic of today is about Super Bowl Ads. Firstly let me tell you what is Super Bowl. For all of you who don't know, the Super Bowl is the NFL Championship, for American Football. American football is a sport that is pretty much just rugby with pads, time-outs, a little break in-between every play, and cheerleaders. Super Bowl is not known for its Game but for the money spent on Ads during this tournament. Every years billions of dollars are spent on the ads in this tournament. Ad agencies tries to make the ads most innovative and funniest for this tournament. And even people watch the tournament more for watching ads and getting entertained through ads.

 

Watch what Super Bowl is !!!

Now the question is that, does the money spent on Super Bowl ads makes any sense. Most Super Bowl viewers are more interested in how funny a commercial is as opposed to what it's trying to sell. More over in Super Bowl ads the competition remains so much that so many ads are shown and it becomes impossible for the viewers to remember any of the ads.

Take last year's most popular advertisement.  That one featured Betty White, but does anyone remember which product she was representing?  If viewers remember anything about Super Bowl commercials, they remember the celebrities, they don't remember the brands.

The Who.. Performing at Superbowl

Super Bowl advertising really proves one thing: consumers are fickle.  While big businesses spend big bucks on commercials that air during the Super Bowl, most viewers aren't rushing to the stores to pick up the latest products rapped by the likes of Justin Beiber. Marketing is about making a sell.  When big businesses figure that out, maybe Super Bowl spending will decline.

This year's run of Super Bowl advertisements saw its share of winners – and plenty of losers, right?

From resurrecting Doritos, dogs serving Bud Light, a Skecher celebutant to socia networking sites, this year's Super Bowl sponsors had a variety of creative ideas in store for its viewers.

Some advertisements were hilarious, and some were quite boring to say the least.

 

As for humor, it might be fair to say that the Doritos chip ads can claim bragging rights over the other slew of sponsors.

Definitely a viewers' favorite, the "Healing Chips" ad brought a 91 percent positive rating on www.foxsports.com/ads, the official site for the advertisements.

 

The good folks over at Bud Light also showed their company spirit, especially in their "Dog Sitter" ad that featured a middle-aged man offering to help dog sit while his friend leaves the house for a night.

Shifting to later that night, the dogs have been trained to host, spin music, and wait on party-goers. The ad showed one of the dogs acting as a bartender while issuing out ice cold glasses of Bud Light. Now that's a mind boggler for you, but it still pulled in an 89 percent approval rating.

There were other sponsors such as McDonald's and Bridgestone anthropomorphized animals and pets in such a way to gain viewership and popularity for their advertisements.

Bridgestone's "Karma" ad was the highest rated at 97 percent.

E-trade made a statement this year by using the "talking baby" in its run of advertisements. However, the concepts and dialogue consisted of dry humor that slowly turned into an unsuccessful joke. Still, it was very popular with viewers.

Aside from being sponsored by some of the world's most lucrative franchises, it was evident that even the most popular companies couldn't quite hold up their end of the deal.

Skechers went out of the ordinary this year when they chose to collaborate with "celebutante" Kim Kardashian in hopes of boosting the demand of its new line of workout shoes.

 

It was a very nice try, but it was obvious that regardless of Kardashian's new found fame and popularity, the viewers weren't buying that one the least bit. It received a 30 percent approval rating. That's about the same as the public's approval of Congress.

Instead of entertaining, some advertisements pushed the limits of taste

One Doritos ad featured an effeminate man on break during a regular day at work who gave off the impression that he would do anything for a bag of Doritos chips – even if it meant licking leftover chip bits off the fingers of one of his male co-workers.

 

The stereotype of promiscuous gay men was blatant, and the use of the stereotype was not an easy pill to swallow for some.

After this Sunday, surely the world of advertisement media can now be compared to sports. You win some. You lose some.

Sprite: The game of Punch lines… clear hai

The coke’s side of life is very different. It is full of happiness and joy, this is what coke was trying to show in one of its Ad Campaign that says ‘The Coke Side of life’. The product has no definition of itself that what it is. Is it a energy drink, or a refreshment or a fruit drink or a drink to make a person healthy or active. It features none of them but it has established itself as a drink that brings joy into people’s life, that makes people closer to each other and a drink that is used to enjoy the party.

Think for a while that was it possible without advertisements? Or was it possible to sell a product that has not any merit but is only a drink and if said in simple terms, is a cold drink only? The drink used as substitute for water that can make your throat cool for sometime and that can give you relief from summer for sometime. Could there be any better substitute to water? Still the Cola Manufactures are able to substitute water. This is said clearly by the Punchline of Sprite, “Bujhaye only pyas, Baki All Bakwas”. This all is made possible through Advertisement Tools. And the punch line/tagline plays a vital role in doing that. As these lines are used to spread the message that ad of a particular product wants to convey.

The Sprite’s Punchline was able to deliver what it was trying to convey and got huge success in the very beginning. But CocaCola had continually been experimenting with its punch lines. For instance, Coke launched sprite in India in 1999 and at that time the product was launched with the tagline as “Bujhaye only pyas, Baki All Bakwas” that was changed to “All Taste, No Gyan” later on. All the ads of Sprite have been complete nonsense without much creativity and innovation but still they performed well except few. The main reason behind that might be the taste of the product and  the brand value of Coca-Cola that made most of its Ads a success.

Coke(Sprite) challenged Pepsi(Mountain Dew) into the battle by making fun of Pepsi in its Ads:

Want anything more.. All Taste, No Gyan

 

The ad is spoofing the tagline of Pepsi- Ye dil mange more. The scene is something like the scene of our mythology(Mahabharata). It is not clear what the ad wants to convey but it is indirectly making fun of the tagline of pepsi(Ye dil mange more) by showing that a person wants the person drinking Sprite to do something more. But he replies “Kya more”, then he says to sing and fly kites etc. The motive of Ad is to show that persons doing something more are just making fun of public. Watch the Ad above, then it will be more clear.

 

All Taste.. No Gyan

The ad is spoofing Mountain Dew. The guys enters the shop demanding Dew(I wanna do(dew)) but the shopkeeper dint get what they are saying. And then, someone translates that they wanna do(piss). The ad is indirectly making fun of the brand- Mountain Dew.

I still remember the time when the ad of Sprite used to say, “Deewano pe naa jaao, apni akal ladao”, yes this was also line of punch for an ad campaign of Coke’s Sprite. Coke kept on changing the punchlines for Sprite as it was getting the cut throat competition from Mountain Dew. This rivalry gave birth to a new punchline i.e. “Seedhi Baat, No Bakwas”

What the company wants to show about its brand through all these taglines is pretty unclear. The first tagline straightly says that the product is made as a perfect solution to the thirst only. The punch line was having sufficient potential to compete because this was telling the USP(Unique Selling Proposition) for the brand that it is simply a thirst hunter which no other cola is. After positioning itself different from colas, sprite tried to alter its image to a position that it is the only brand that people likes most because of its taste(All Taste…). Here the brand became confused in what to convey and ultimately got ineffective. Then again, it is difficult to say that why the brand was repositioned as a brand of minded fellows(deewano pe naa…). The brand lost its equity just because of its experiments and buckled under Mountain Dew.

Darr ke Aage Jeet hai… Mountain Dew

But still it tried to regain its equity by doing some new experiments with its new punchline that indicates that it’s a drink for those who love Straight Forwardness(Seedhi baat…). In.com, in an effort to provide an innovative branding solution to Coca-Cola India’s lemon-lime beverage brand Sprite, has woven Sprite’s tagline ‘Seedhi Baat No Bakwaas’ into its email service by associating the Inbox and the Trash folder with ‘Seedhi Baat In’ and ‘Bakwaas Out’ respectively.

After that the brand again changed its tagline to “Clear Hai”. Look at this ad with such a bullshit that conveys no message and have no meaning yet it is success. In this way the ads are targeting youth of today those who loves nonsense:

Refreshing Sprite.. Clear Hai

The ad goes like stupid conversation with a frog- the sprite colored frog. The frog wants the kiss of the man drinking sprite, to become a princess. The ad shows that even frogs are crazy for sprite. The message is silly and funny both, as no one would like to kiss a frog, yet it is catchy.

It is remarkable to know that lastly the brand came up with a tagline that was the combination of all its previous taglines, “Seedhi Baat, No Bakwaas… Clear Hai”. This campaign have more creative ads in its portfolio than any of the previous one. The Ads are more funny with less non-sense.

Seedhi Baat, No Bakwas… Clear Hai

The two ads shows that how smart are the Sprite people.

Seedhi Baat, No Bakwas… Clear Hai

The Unclear goals and unrelated taglines affect the brand image and equity. Unclearly defined target market creates problems in positioning and hence occurred such kind of problems. That was not the case with the Sprite even after having stupidity in its Ads.

The brand was much clear on its goals since  beginning and positioned it as a product for juveniles through its stupidity. And though it was successful in beating its direct rival i.e. Mountain Dew. Mountain Dew positioned itself as a dink for those people who have dare to do something challenging, since beginning”Darr ke aage jeet hai”. No Doubt the campaigns of Dew were also fantastic with sufficient innovation and message in it. That is the only reason that both of the brands have developed their own brand equity.

Sprite has not applied AKAL and still made people DEEWANA of it… Clear Hai.