“International Women’s Day, that one special day a year for half the population of earth. Knock yourselves out 3 ½ billion people.”
– John Oliver on Last Week Tonight
Like every year, since the social media boom started, this year too a number of brands wanted to honour and celebrates womanhood. You can read opinions about them on ET Brand Equity (they’ve mixed up the layout in terms of the comment and layout), Mint, Business Standard and Afaqs.
I set out to look for themes in these ads – both topics these brands talked about as well as execution. Culture Machine, a digital video company for whom brand solutions or creation of branded video content is a key revenue source, even openly mocked the template-isation of women’s day ads in a video they called, “every Women’s Day video ever”. Dark colours, portrait shots, training montages, intense and strong expressions, fast cuts, summing up womanhood in one single sentence and ending with brand logo wishing Happy Women’s Day with a #hashtag is what they say make a powerful Women’s Day video. Then, there was Orient Electric which took a jibe at brands (like themselves) by saying, they take full-page ads that make you feel powerful or make you cry by highlighting issues like inequality, rights etc., for a day and then it’s business as usual the next day.
You can view a few ads below.
Here are the themes from about 30 brand videos (added more later) that released this Women’s Day that I happened to see over the past 10 days.
Celebrating women: Many brands played safe and stuck to the standard montage of happy women or talked about the role women played in everyday life and simply wished happy Women’s day. There was the de rigueur celebrating sportswomen ad from Parle G and Vivo (Star Sports had the same one running for 3 years and JSW did it the last year) and clips of employees and partners from UpGrad, IndiaMart and Clove Dental.
Financial services brands played the safest and peddled their products – Reliance Home Finance offered exclusive discounts to women on that day and Kotak Life wanted every working woman in India to get a term insurance. At the crux of these ads was the recognising of women as equal half and more.
Women’s day every day: At the other end were durable brands like Usha and Orient electric that said, women’s day should be every day and while they said it, they mixed in themes of gender equality, gender bias and empowerment. John Oliver’s quip does strike a chord, if you don’t know what the day stands for! Some viewers pointed out that PC Chandra Jewellers ad that called to #UnCelebrate women’s day was ignorant about the real reason for the day. While one pointed out that the ad was ironically released on Women’s day!
Role reversal depiction with kids: Kids make for un-skippable ads. Ask flipkart. Last year Brooke Bond released an ad film called ‘A Boy who Girls Like‘ on Women’s Day which tried to break gender stereotypes by showing type of toys played with by boys and girls. This year, Borosil served its own version of breaking gender stereotypes by showing a kid brother serve breakfast to his kid sister getting late for work!
Social Experiment: A few brands tried what they called a social experiments. ICICI Prudential did a Dove-ish take – asking women to list the day’s activities and then asking the men in their lives to review them and take the onus of a few jobs and balance her everyday life. Dalda did a candid camera in restaurants withholding serving food to women and Reebok put a bruised woman in a box and asked people to comment. One thing was common to all, horrible acting.
One statistic at the base: A cause has to have a statistic at the back doesn’t it? IXIGO made a one around the fact that ‘8/10 women still need approval to travel’. Reebok made one because they found ‘85% who saw a women’s bruises believed they were a result of physical violence.’ Google was the only sane one putting up a page about search interests over time.
Gender bias on roads: It’s a no brainer that auto companies talked about the gender bias towards women drivers. Renault blatantly copied their creative idea for their ad from those pranks videos (check maxman.tv video’s on YouTube) were women drivers show off their skills.
Not many ads stuck to the template that the blush ad talked about. But, what they did was talk about topics that were very distant and unrelated from what the brand usually talked about or was committed to. And summing up this vague link between the brand and the topic (A rider is a rider; Before you celebrate her special day appreciate that she helps you balance every day; it is time for every woman to become fit to fight for the one who brings fragrance of happiness every moment), really didn’t cut ice with me.
What I did find interesting though was that I didn’t find a single ad from brands that made these ads last year and a completely new set of brands jump into this bandwagon of releasing Women’s Day ads this year!
