Ram Aur Shyam and the Power of Stories!!

Some time back I had promised myself that will pen this post about Ram aur Shyam!

Well, Ram aur Shyam were these two characters(detectives) created by the iconic India brand - Parle (Poppins) many decades back...They are not around anymore...The current Poppins tagline reads - Goli Rainbow Wali...Okay so why am I telling all this...

One fine day, as a harried father hassled for a different bed-time story every night, I decided to dig into memory and fished out 'Ram aur Shyam' from the attic of my memory!

- These Ram aur Shyam stories came as a serialised print ad on the back page of a children's magazine called 'Parag'(from the TOI group if I remember correctly, but went off the market more than a decade back)

- I loved Poppins(the differently coloured, button shaped candies - 10 to a pack) and loved these two characters who solved a crime using Poppins! Sometimes the Poppins trail led to the 'bad guy'. Other times the Poppins pack doubled up as a gun to hold up the baddie...

- Three decades later, on a whim and no particular reason, I decided to resurrect the two characters to satisfy the daily story needs of Neo...

- Little did I know that Ram aur Shyam would be an instant hit at par with Ben 10 and my rating as father which till then was trailing behind my wife by a mile would receive a shot in the arm LOL

- These stories are fairly interactive:-) Neo chooses the venue of the story every night(that's a whole new ritual)...Ram aur Shyam take a flight to that venue. So he chooses the airline as well...

- The success of these stories with my 5 year old son remind me of a sad truth : many Indian brands have often abandoned their well entrenched brand stories and carelessly moved ahead. Like Poppins did or like Ceat abandoned the Rhino story or like Air India fails to build upon the Maharaja mascot/ story...Onida had to ferret out the devil story from it's past to regain(well partially) it's voice again...

- The problem, I feel is never in the stories. It's almost always in the lack of belief in brand teams and the absence of imagination to recast them for the new times...

- Like I mentioned in the Ceat post, powerful brand narratives shouldn't be junked in a huff...There are ways and means to contemporise the plot and the characters.

- In fact the more the media gets cluttered, and the decibel level of brand hype gets raised, simple brand stories from the past might help communicate better.Stories will allow better conversation with the brand in the new social media eco-system that's getting constructed all around!

- I just hope with animation getting so evolved and games getting central to marketing to kids, maybe characters like Ram aur Shyam(and their contemporary avatars) will again find their way into the brand narrative...

Either ways, I marvel how a candy brand(mere zamane ka) came to my rescue in telling the daily bedtime stories:-)

P.S. Just couldn't find a copy of the old Ram Aur Shyam Poppins print ad...Hai kya kissi ke pass?

My2centsonsocialmedia

It's been a gap of two weeks from the blog...The longest in quite some time...Work, a few articles and general lethargy. No sublime or sacred reason to be away for this long. But actually the resolution not to blog from home might just be the reason:-)

Last Friday at our Media division's weekly meet, did a small talk on social media...These are the points I touched under the label - 10 Points to Mull About Social Media(For elevator pitches to clients, bosses and generally to impress other people:-)

1. It’s a Kick-Ass Learning Tool. Of course the price one pays is attention deficit...But if you can ride over it, you come up wiser! Am still struggling!!

2.Keeps you plugged in...I recently wrote an article on twitter and was rudely reminded by social media of the inaccuracy of some of the facts! Puts you on your toes all the time. One of the better researches I did for Nokia was using a college kid and her facebook account some months back!

3. Gives you a flavour of the new creative eco-system. More about that here...

4. Open Global Lab For Thinking. Don't exactly know how it's helping brands, but at the individual level all of us are growing because of the new connections we make every day!

5. Trend spotting. Often with a planning department of one social media and the web are the best trend spotting tools available...

6. Related to pt. 4 above, social media is a Gr8 Collaboration Tool

7. And of course a good( and equally bad) PR tool available to the individual, the brand and the company.

8. I have also found it very useful to Seed Strategic & Creative Content within the Agency and among Clients

9. It's a Fun Place to Be.

10. And my media team wud agree, it always displays - Signs of the changing/(ed) Media Landscape...

Maybe will try to thread them together into a more cogent piece later...

In case you want the presentation mail me at mannsinha@gmail.com

Be Born Everyday.

60 second commercial, 1 minute thoughts:-) Just saw the new Titan ad on youtube.

I liked the spot. My planner was harsher at 5/10. But Aamir is going the SRK way. Not that credible. Bit Preachy. 'Crafted-in-the-studio-reality'. But still better than what's on offer this month!

I was also grappling with the thought that 'naya idea nahin hai' but does that matter anymore!! And I felt 'Be Born Everyday' is a more powerful tag than 'Be More'. Hate this 'More' tag...

Teach India : Wish I Had Thot Of It

There often comes an idea you wish you had done it/ thought about it. The Teach India campaign from TOI is one suck kick-ass idea!

Brutally simple, yet immensely powerful and so sorely needed for India.

"Teach India" is an initiative by 'The Times of India' to help provide an equal opportunity for education to underprivileged children.

The aim of "Teach India" is to provide a platform to educated Indians to provide assistance in basic education to the unprivileged children.

"Teach India" will connect educated individuals with the specialist education providers.

'The Times of India' has tied up with select NGOs in the field of education in multiple cities across India.

Participants have to devote just 2 hours a day to teach underprivileged children, either in a formal environment or even informal teaching like story telling.

There were mote than 10K responses on day one. Some companies are volunteering batches of 50 employees for this...I just signed up!

Visual Thinking

I was there most of last week in Hongkong for a workshop! All the planners in the region were there...

For a change power-point was subservient to conversations. And there was loads of visual thinking! We drew and thought aloud and the other way around.

1. I was pleasantly surprised how powerful the medium could be in framing a strategic issue and trying to solve it.

2. It was a lot easier to co-solve problems when one thought in pictures.

3. What I liked most was that pictures allowed me to stay longer with the problem. I am going to adopt more of this visual thinking in my day-to-day work...

4. And would love to have a visualiser in the planning team. Or out-source one for planning!

5. It also saved a whole lot of time. Opened up time for thinking. We used this picture to make a point/ story/ thot thumb-nail about how planning can be made more 'influential'...

Motorola CrystalTalk

Good idea. Simple execution. Good use of YouTube! I wish Motos sold as much as Nokia!!

Here's a brand whose advertising and cool quotient leads the product...Whatdowedomoto?