Airtel: Is he your 'friend type'?

Airtel is not willing to let its popular campaign ‘Har ek friend zaroori hai’ (HFZ) go out of currency. If the earlier ads had featured young college goers as friends who appealed to all, its new effort is targetted more sharply at the youth in its theme and the medium used.

Going digital with 20 short clips on yet more ‘friend types’, Airtel talks about its many services from VAS (value added services) to DTH (direct to home). The ads produced by Old School Productions also mould the HFZ soundtrack, composed by Ram Sampath, to different styles such as lavani, bhangra, hip-hop and qawwali. The friend ‘types’ you will be introduced to include a pakau friend, a tube-light friend, a proxy (attendance) friend and a chipku friend among others.

Agnello Dias, co-founder of the agency, Taproot, and the mastermind of the HFZ creatives, says, “In the digital space, there is a greater emphasis on viral-worthiness or the ability for the content to spread. Hence, we had to make the campaign interactive.” Gamification is what they are calling it.

Airtel has created a YouTube channel, separate from its corporate YouTube channel, at www.youtube.com/airtel for this leg of the HFZ campaign. With the trademark humour of its mainstream campaign, rustled up by Taproot, the videos get unlocked one by one as the users answer questions posed at the end of each video. You are led on to videos featuring the type of friend which is in line with the characteristics chosen as an answer at the end of the previous video. The interactivity is another hook for its target audience for this YouTube channel. Social networking and virals have ensured that everything from advertisements to random video clips form the content gets consumed on the internet. Most of all, by the youth.

The original TVC had been viewed 2 million times on YouTube (Kolaveri Di was seen 38 million times on YouTube) and the video shared 62,000 times on Facebook. Dias says, “The content on the internet can be edgier or more targetted to specific groups of people rather than be broadbased as in the mass media. Hence, the types like an activist, bhukkad or a proxy friend could ring a bell with those who have such friends.”

Bharat Bambawale, director, global brand, Bharti Airtel, says, “We put these ads on the internet because that is where the younger generation spends its time. The campaign springs from the 65,000 friend suggestions which we received following our mass media campaign. While HFZ was running on TV, we had invited people to suggest friend types. The gamification helps in making an instant connect between the viewers and the products or services that we advertise at the end of each video.” Bambawale does not rule out taking some of the more popular friend types mainstream after the digital run.

Backing up the videos are also numerous prizes up for grabs if the user participates. The more users tag these videos on their networks, the more social points they hoard to be able to win a gadget or even a trip.