When this report was filed, Air-tel’s campaign jingle Har Ek Friend Zaroori Hota Hai had clocked around 2.27 million views on YouTube, the video was shared over 81,000 times on Facebook, and mentioned by over 20,000 tweets, making for a Twitter reach of 11.14 lakh! And the hyped “Friendship Anthem” is only getting started, if Mohit Beotra, head, brand and media at Bharti Airtel is to be believed.
“The new campaign has been a roaring success, as this delivered our brand message strongly yet again. It is an extension of our new dynamic and youthful brand identity and the brand promise of dil jo chahey, paas laye. It has been created with a young air which has become an integral part the brand,” he adds. The same excitement is felt in other companies united by the latest jingle or anthem, with brands such as Hero Corp trying to encourage people to explore the heroism within. But despite going great guns, these ads still lack what the “real anth-ems” had, say a few observers.
Brand expert and CEO, Harish Bijoor Consults Inc., Harish Bijoor awaits something of a magnitude of Hamara Bajaj, which once had the nation abuzz. “Others followed. Today, if one looks at both the Airtel and Hero Corp efforts, they are all about knitting a contemporary feel. One is more generic than the other. The Airtel one is the larger of the two. It is all about friendship, which is a universal truth. The Hero effort with the Hum Mein Hai Hero is a bit dated though. It is rather 1990-ish as compared to the more contemporary Airtel an-them,” he says.
Prathap Suthan, chief creative officer, iYogi, agrees. For him, the Airtel jingle is a great song that has the potential of spinning out into a very popular piece. “It’s like a great track that’s captured a moment in time, but doesn’t have the depth to become immortal. Yes, it is a chartbuster, top of the pops, but that’s where I would see this end,” he says. For those who are confused between a jingle and an anthem, one must clarify that an anthem ought to have the soul to crisscross age, culture, and racial biases — especially in a country likes ours, says Suthan. Anthems are bigger than brand names and commercial slogans of every kind that stare at us. They tend to get generic, tend to weave the bigger truth into the brand rather than taking the smaller brand truth and weaving it into the bigger anthem.
“An anthem, unlike a jingle that forms a small part of a brand’s ad, is an ad in full, a whole piece of communication by itself and often suits communication objectives that have an emotional overlay, ‘bonding’ with audiences, laying forth the brand's beliefs, corporate positioning efforts for instance,” says Amit Kekre, head, planning, Mudra West (Part of the Mudra Group).
According to experts, the best anthems are the ones that are not brand-forced. The trick is to create an anthem with the lowest common denominator consumer in mind. Weave it with a universal truth, such as love or friendship. Also try not to force-fit a brand into the anthem. It does not matter if the anthem itself does not have a brand name in it. “One must keep in mind that the anthem is not the commercial. Other commercials need to supplement and complement it,” says Bijoor, who cautions that anthems can get boring after a while and have the ability of opening up a flank for your competitor to mock you as well.
The key points are that anthems must be in sync with the brand strategy and the brand idea. But from a creative execution standpoint, they must be easy on the ear and the tongue, with hummability and repeat hearing value being critical factors. “The anthem shouldn’t talk down to people but should be crafted in a way that people find easy to adapt and remember. The prime challenge such ads face is producing a jingle/anthem as well as airing it — with the duration often longer, making it an expensive affair. One needs to be very vigilant about when to create anthem ads — as the large-scale canvas of anthems may not be suitable to meet more day-to-day specific, nuanced communication requirements that often warrant communicating product attributes and benefits,” says Kekre.
Besides the challenge, a nice jingle or an anthem, if made right, can take a company or brand places! Not only helping achieve objectives like better recall and more eyeballs, ads based on these have the huge potential of becoming part of popular culture and assume the shape of properties that audiences like to own and share. Anthems especially often transcend from being pieces of brand communication to something people adopt as their own — for values they personally believe in.
“Anthems aren’t just sung; they could also be said or even written. Like the Lead India Amitabh Bachchan’s monologue, Harley Davidson’s ‘Living by it’, or Diesel’s ‘Be Stupid’. Anthems take on more of a philosophical route — larger than life, something that unites a nation or a mood or an emotion or a lifestyle. Then again, you could even say that anthems in the advertising world could be whittled down to something as small, inspirational and global as Nike’s ‘Just do it’ or just a single film — like Apple’s ‘Why 1984 won’t be like 1984’. They may not have been songs, or jingles, but both of them have been the acorns of very successful oaks. And they have been the anthem on the lips of every self-respecting ad professional,” says Suthan.