As sweet as ever

Spot Light | Cadbury Dairy Milk

With more than 13 years’ experience in advertising, Raghu Bhat and Manish Bhatt, founder-directors of Scarecrow Communications Ltd, have worked on brands such as Asian Paints, Future Capital and Vaseline.

Campaign

The new ad for Cadbury by Ogilvy and Mather Pvt. Ltd, under the Shubh Aarambh (Auspicious Start) campaign, shows a young man being summoned for ragging in college. In turn, he gives his seniors Cadbury Dairy Milk chocolates. When asked why, he says his mother tells him to always start anything important in life by eating something sweet. The “seniors”, touched, make friends with him.

First thoughts on the ad?

The ad can be considered the fifth sequel of the earlier Shubh Aarambh “bus stop” ad. The blockbuster creative idea of inaugurating life’s little milestones with something sweet has been retained. The ragging is a “youth” situation with an inherent dramatic quotient and, therefore, interesting. This is timely, as it breaks away from the intense tear-jerker emotional stuff involving adults. However, a ragging “victim” who distributes chocolates to his seniors is the equivalent of a death-row prisoner tipping his executioner. It displays a self-sacrificing Gandhian benevolence, which some people may not agree with.

What would you have done differently?

We would have dropped the “mummy kehti hai (mother says)” bit in the dialogue as the guy looks too old to say it.

How does ‘Shubh Aarambh’ stack up against what Cadbury has done in the past?

The evolution of Cadbury in the past 15 years is a tribute to the power of advertising. Kuch Khaas Hai (There’s Something Special) helped make chocolates acceptable to adults. Kuch Meetha Ho Jaye (Let’s Have Something Sweet) tried to make chocolate a special occasion “mithai”. Shubh Aarambh is now trying to make it an “everyday” and “after-dinner” mithai. As a result, a Swiss-British brand (Cadbury) containing, ironically, a highly bitter ingredient (cocoa) that is grown in Africa has now come to represent an inherently Indian tradition of “meetha”.

Some thoughts on the category as a whole.

All chocolate communication in India is aimed at masking the ingredient-centric chocolate associations (dark, bitter, indulgence, aphrodisiacal) and replacing it with an alternative world of “meetha” moments aimed at securing its place in the “Indian milieu”.

A well-done international ad in the same category?

Our favourite campaign is for Ben&Jerry’s. Their baseline says—We Are on a Mission! Their chocolate chip cookie was positioned as the world’s first anti-nuclear cookie!

As told to Anushree Chandran.

anushree.m@livemint.com