Airtel spreads the friendship web, with entertainment at Re 1

Airtel’s campaign for its ‘Re 1 Entertainment Store’ promotes digital offerings (songs, email, videos and Facebook) at Re 1. The campaign comprising four TVCs created by Taproot India plays on friendship and went on air in early August - on ‘Friendship Day’.

One of the films (Music) features a young man playing Antakshari with a school girl who is differently abled on hearing and speech. He sings a song and uses sign language for her benefit. When he asks her to sing a song starting with the Hindi letter ‘E’, she thinks for a while before using her phone to play a song. She hands the phone over to the man who looks on spell bound as she enacts the lyrics. They hug each other while the voice over says “Ab song suno ek rupaye main. Bas 56789 par call karo. Songs for Re 1, friendship free.” (Now listen to a song for Re 1. Just call 56789) 

Another film features two young girls in a judo competition who bond over a shared ‘Hanuman chalisa’ on the phone before competing with each other. A film titled Facebook features a liftman asking a young man if he would ‘become his friend’ on Facebook. The surprised boy agrees after thinking for a bit as it is revealed that Facebook is now available at just Re1 per day. Another film shows that the e-mail is now within everyone’s reach, at Re 1.

Agnello Dias, chairman and co-founder, Taproot India, said, “We had done a campaign on the Re 1 digital offering of Airtel earlier in which the accent was more on the value of Re. 1. With this series we wanted to highlight the shift from the underlined part of Re 1 to what you are actually getting. Thus there was less prominence to Re 1 but more importance to what product is being offered- email, Facebook and so on.”

“The campaign idea was how friendships can take place in the most unlikely of situations. We have featured people who are competitors or strangers or belonging to different socio economic classes. The film shows how the product links them in momentary friendship,” he added.

Credits
Agency: Taproot India
Production house: Equinox Films
Executive creative director: Agnello Dias, Santosh Padhi
Writers: Agnello Dias, Apoorva Jain
Client servicing: Naved Punjabi, Sameer Aasht, Gargi Vegiraju
Director: Ram Madhvani
Producer: Manoj Shroff
Cinematographer: Anay Goswami
Music: Vishal Khurana