My favourite campaign is 'Ye Dil Maange More' for Pepsi: FCB India CEO

Asking for more from life

MY TAKE

What the campaign did was to take a brand which was already ahead to new, unassailable heights. It was an iconic campaign. In my memory, the brand has not had a stronger campaign before or since.

Brand: PEPSI 

Year of launch: 1998-99

Agency: JWT

Which is your best campaign and why have you chosen it? Please also specify the year when it was launched?

My favourite campaign is Ye Dil Maange More for Pepsi which was launched in 1999. I had just moved to JWT Delhi from JWT Kolkata and that was my first campaign after the shift. It was a hugely popular campaign at the time. I was the head of the Pepsi business at JWT and so was leading the team. The slogan was created by Anuja Chauhan. It was our adaptation of the global slogan which was “Ask for more”. “Ye dil maange more” had more heart than the other slogan. This was because “Ask for more” was more about asking for more of a drink and Ye dil maange more was more about wanting more from life and thus had a deeper and richer meaning.

What did the campaign achieve for the brand? Could you also share some numbers to corroborate your claim?

At that point of time, Pepsi was the leader in the soft drinks market. It was way ahead of Coca Cola or Thums Up. What the campaign did was to take a brand which was already ahead to new, unassailable heights. It was an iconic campaign. In my memory, the brand has not had a stronger campaign before or since.

Rohit Ohri, Group chairman & chief executive officer, FCB India

What was the key idea behind the campaign?

It was the time when digitalisation was catching speed in India and the experiences consumers were getting were far richer and wider. So the whole thing was about young people asking for more from life. They wanted more experiences, more fun and more adventure. It was truly the coming of age of the young consumer that today I am confident about making these choices and I really want to reach out and grab more of these experiences. So, on the one hand, it talked about the time and captured the imagination and the desire of the youth at that particular point of time; on the other, it also spoke about the whole craving for Pepsi because the taste of the drink had a kind of “unstoppableness” to it. So in a beautiful way, I could use “Ye dil maange more” for both Pepsi and for wanting more experiences from life.

What was the industry response to the campaign?

We did win a lot of awards including the ABBY Award but the slogan became a cultural thing in India with people using it to express themselves. So when a brand slogan is remembered even 17-18 years later, books are written, a movie, not sponsored by Pepsi, uses the slogan for its title (incidentally, the film has Shahid Kapoor in the lead who also featured in the campaign’s first TVC), it is the highest level of recognition that we can get.

What were the execution challenges?

We created some 20 dramatic executions with the slogans. The launch film of Ye dil maange more had Shah Rukh Khan, Kajol and Rani Mukherjee and this was right after the movie Kuch Kuch Hota Hai which had these three people. What we wanted was to recast them after the blockbuster film which itself was a huge challenge. People in the advertising industry or Bollywood could not believe that we had got the three of them together for a commercial and even the production was at a grand scale posing its own challenges on how to put it together but we managed to pull that off. The fact is that it scaled new heights with creativity and the star power it brought to play. And immediately after that we had the (ICC) World Cup campaign where for the first time, the number one Bollywood star Shah Rukh Khan was brought together with the biggest cricket star Sachin Tendulkar in one commercial. Another first was that a TV commercial was released in two parts.