Made in India, for the world
BOOK EXTRACT
| There's the expected tale of Cobra striking it rich with some out-of-the-box promotions, but what's hard to swallow is why a book that lists Bilimoria as one of the authors then proceeds to refer to himself in the third person throughout the book. |
| By 2002, an excited Bilimoria was ready to commission Cobra's first television and cinema commercials. The idea was for them to have an Indian flavour. Saatchi wanted to produce them in India, and Bilimoria said that was okay. He liked the ideas too. But he wasn't so keen on the price. |
| 'They came up with great ideas for these campaigns,' he says. 'Then they showed me the budget to produce these commercials. I nearly fell off my chair. It was $1m.' Bilimoria asked why it was so expensive. On top of the $1million, there was still the cost of paying for the airtime to show them on cinema and TV. |
| Saatchi explained. Apart from the production costs, there was the cost of taking the producer, the film director, the cast, the crew, and the equipment, to shoot in India. After shooting the ad, everyone and everything had to be brought back. |
| In reality, the ad agency suggested, it was a cost reduction, as a brand like Guinness or Stella might spend $1m producing one commercial, and the agency was producing two commercials. So it was two for the price of one. |
| But Bilimoria had an idea. Didn't Bollywood, the Indian based film-industry centred on Mumbai, produce more films than Hollywood each year? Had Saatchi considered that India has a highly developed commercial advertising industry? The agency responded that the quality wouldn't be good enough. That was red rag to a bull. |
| By this point Cobra had just set up an office in India. Bilimoria made some enquiries, short-listed the top commercial production companies in India, before selecting one of the leading companies, and one of the leading directors. |
| Then Bilimoria persuated the people at Saatchi to use Indian resources. In the end, because the Saatchi team used an Indian crew, an Indian cast, shot and edited the ad on location in India, only two people flew out from Team Saatchi in the UK. The commercials were produced at a fraction of Saatchi's original $1m budget "" a win for Britain and British creativity, a win for India and Indian resources, and a win for Cobra beer. |
| According to Bilimoria, the people at Saatchi were 'gobsmacked' by the quality of the finished result and subsequently used the same director on other projects. |
| The commercials "" one, 'Carwash', features a car washing service that used elephants to spray its customers' vehicles "" were screened on Channel 4, E4, Virgin Atlantic flights, the Cobra website, as well as running as a national cinema campaign. |
| As a result of Bilimoria breaking the ad filming conventions, there was some spill-over publicity too. The story of how the advertising was produced later featured as a case study on an edition of Newsnight that looked at the potential for creative links between Britain and India. |
| BOTTLED FOR BUSINESS The less gassy guide to entreprenership |
| AUTHORS: Karan Bilimoria with Steve Coomber PAGES: 169 PRICE: Rs 299 PUBLISHER: Wiley India |