Cambrian creativity

It isn't a Madonna video, nor a computer ad, it's Airtel urging you to "express ourself".

Talk of endorsements. A television commercial which has Winston Churchill, Sachin Tendulkar, Lata Mangeshkar and Mahatma Gandhi makes you wonder, doesn't it?

Except that the "endorsement" here seems to be the other way round. Airtel, a cellphone network service, is endorsing their brilliance of expression "" hoping that you'd learn a thing or two from such eminence (and use Airtel while at it).

The ad's proposition is clear: "express yourself". And by showing how the power of human expression can prove an inspiration, Airtel hopes to appropriate the "expression" spot in your mindspace for good.

If that happens, Santosh Sood, chief operating officer, Rediffusion DYR, Santosh Sood, would heave in victorious relief "" after all the hard work that went into its making. "The ad actually took several months to conceptualise," he says, "as we were looking at historical footage and parts from contemporary history as well."

Shot in black and white, and directed by Ravi Udayawar of Udyawar Productions, the footage spans 50 years. The clips of Tendulkar being declared out by an umpire's raised finger (super: "A raised finger can break a billion hearts") and the late Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan doing an eloquent voice quaver ("One voice can dissolve boundaries") are actually the relatively contemporary parts of the expression story.

Nitpickers may mutter that Tendulkar expressing himself with his bat would've made for a more compelling cricket clip, but then, that hardly detracts from the commercial's focus.

Given how marvellously single-minded the commercial is, such a patchwork of images coming together to make the brand's point clear, the selection of personalities must surely have been a tough decision.

It was. "We had to choose people or actions which could evoke emotions like no one else," says Sood. So a lot of research went into the selection of people and moments in history.

Eminence is not all there was to it: there's an unknown wall-breaker, for instance, inspiring a different sort of revolution.

It's part of the brand's long-running theme, in the view of Hemant Sachdev, director, marketing and communications, Airtel. And unlike tactical messages about network coverage that play on the element of surprise, popular some years ago, this theme has enduring value.

"Expressing and communicating are perhaps two of the most basic emotions," he says, "and we wanted to tell people that simple things can actually make a huge difference to people's lives."

The campaign, says Sood, will evolve. The self-expression stance has had a few earlier claimants in India too (Archie's and Goldflake cards among them), but Airtel owns that position quite clearly now.