Advertising - Purpose & Pitfalls

I have served the Advertising & communication business for close to 3 decades.

I count on my blessings to have also created some award winning, innovative & category first work for various brands I worked with. Some of the work was first in technology, some innovative and shocking in its visual messaging.

When it comes to good work, I often wonder how much of that is good for awards, and what component of that work goes beyond wining awards & really serving the purpose it was meant for.

Easy temptation was to pick on someone else work and poke holes around it. But that will mean I am succumbing to easy trap of being an arm chair critic.

So I thought of picking up one of my own work created for Unilever India. This was an ad created for Rin and was beautifully conceptualised by JWT and shot by God of Photography Prashant Godbole.

Here is the snippet of this ad from RIN India Facebook page

Human insight on this is - 70% of water consumed in laundry process is during rinsing of clothes as consumers keep rinsing until there is no visible foam. Rin patented 'smart-foam' technology deployed in Rin bar helps save up to two buckets of water in every washing cycle.

Now would this be termed as an ad only for awards with a shocking visual (shot at Wai in Maharashtra), or would you term it as a case of advertising with a purpose.

I believe the intent of the ad was to market the new R&D from Unilever which pioneered a "smart foam" technology which gives more foam and hence less efforts to rinse resulting in less water consumption.

The brand served the purpose of empowering consumers with technology which helps them "save water". How much of this would actually help in "saving " water is something which I believe no well meaning brand or advertising personnel can control.

The intent and the R&D behind the intent was honest.

Unilever created a innovation to "Market" and to "educate" simultaneously. The fact that his ad was created for main line dailies, intention was to appeal with shock value and hence push the #ESG agenda driven by the brand.

The education impact of this was more on ground activation and educating within the masses who use the product.

It remains to be seen if the brand has any metric to prove ( though it seems pretty difficult) that the smart foam technology saved X litres of waters in last 3 years. But it is worth asking.

In the end, the intent, the investment behind creating a real difference using R&D and the communication honesty is what I would attribute this ad for right purpose.

It will be of interest to evaluate and decode some of "award" wining work and see whether it meets the purpose or leads to a pitfall.

Open to debate & make this a participative dialogue with sole purpose of improving advertising to not just sell more Soap but make it count for results too.