Asking for more from life SHUBHOMOY SIKDAR
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 Ma an ge More for Pepsi which was launched in 1999. I had just moved to J WT Delhi from JWT Kolka ta and that was my first campaign after the shift. It was a huge ly popular campaign at the time. I was the head of the Pepsi business at J WT and so was leading the team. The slogan was created by Anuja Ch au han. It was our adaptation of the global slogan which was “Ask for more ”.“Ye dil maange more” had more heart than the others logan. This was because “Ask for more” was more about asking form oreo fa drink and Ye dil ma an ge more was more about wanting more from life and thus had a deeper and rich er 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.
What was the key idea behind the campaign?
It was the time when digital is at ion was catching speed in India and the experiences consumers were getting were far rich er 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 you that that particular point oftime; 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 AB BY Award but the slogan became a cultural thing in India with people using it to express themselves. So when a brands logan is remembered even 17-18 years later, books are written, a movie, not sponsored by Pepsi, uses the slogan for its title( incident ally, 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 ma an ge more had Shah Rukh Khan, Kajol and Rani Mukherjee and this was right after the movie Ku ch Kuch Hota Hai which had these three people. What we wanted was to re cast them after the block buster 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 commercialand even the production was at a grandscale 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 Tendulkarin one commercial. Another first was that a TV commercial was released in two parts.