Close on the heels of Mother’s day comes Fathers day. Unlike Mother’s day ads, I have been bombarded with just 3 father’s day ads or messages. Searching YouTube for some time and then Googling (incidentally, Google does a better job at indexing and showing videos than YouTube) gave me about 12 ads made in 2015 and 2016 that were worth sharing.
Why so few dad ads? Probably because, unlike Mother’s day which is celebrated mostly on the second Sunday of May across the world, Father’s day is celebrated on different days, though third Sunday in June is the most common in a number of countries. This makes it a little confusing for brands. And more importantly, probably because men/fathers unlike women/mothers are not a core target group for many brands.
The obvious brands targeting men were the culprits. We have brands for men’s clothing, financial products, cars, gadgets and electrical/electronics trying to attract some views and mind space. And how can we forget e-commerce guys who want a finger in every pie!
Overall, the attempts were not even close to that made for Mothers day. Volkswagen India placed an international ad on its channel, as an after thought (?), and garnered only 507 views. Some, like SBI didn’t even share it on YouTube themselves. And, LG India has a video that is kept private!
The 3 ads that I happened to notice are the ones of Google, Raymond and Bank Bazaar.
I noticed the Google one (12th on the list) a couple of days before the actual fathers day. And Google followed its strategy of keeping the message, topic/day agnostic, just like it’s mother day one. I think it also had the insider info on what it was going to do with the doodle as well as the leverage to push this video on both home and trending channels on YouTube resulting in the greater than 1 million views it garnered in these few days.
There was Bank Bazaar (2nd on the list), which was pushing the ad as a standard YouTube pre-roll. Though it garnered 0.7 million views, I am sure a lot of them are repeats and tons of people would have skipped it after the 5 seconds. I think the only 324 (0.05% of views) shares proves it.
Then, there was Raymond which I think was trending #SalutingSingleMothers on Twitter in India. My speculation is that the agency took inspiration from the beginnings of Father’s day. This when Twitter itself was saying the following…
The best Father’s Day hashtag of all: #ThankYouDad.
To dads everywhere, #HappyFathersDay! pic.twitter.com/v6nhTnuiFz— Twitter (@twitter) June 19, 2016
…The result was all wrong for Raymonds. Only 0.1 million shares and YouTube wouldn’t even show the trend statistics!
The recipe for making the ads for Father’s day is as simple as that of making ads for Mother’s day – extol his the virtues, remember him, talk about his idiosyncrasies, teach him something new or let him talk about how he protects you. Then, the secret to making it successful, make the ad to a brief (and not ‘father’s day’ is not a brief), have high production values and have a solid media strategy behind the ad.
P&G did a fabulous job last year with its Vicks ad (7th in the list). It rules with 4.4 million views. Hope to see some such next year!
Update: 23rd June: I’ve added a few more ads of Father’s day to the playlist which I’ve noticed recently.
