It all started with a nondescript red couch on a soot black backdrop. Pledged to rabid diversification , the creator of this range of teasers introduced characters, ranging from desi wild-west bandit lookalike to animated reincarnation of an extinct species of mutated meerkats showing off their hard-to-make-out talents with the couch by their side promising the ( hardly noticing ) viewers a 9th October home visit.
But a couple of days before the D-day (read 9th Oct) everything went wrong. The (almost) same red couch appeared, this time with no accompaniments save a bag of popcorn and a brand name to end with. The purpose of the teaser campaign had been shrewdly belittled and the culprit was BIG tv, who earlier used to irritate potential users with superfluous, exaggerative unmoving ads.
Some were confused, some never cared, and others just were not unfortunate enough to go through this.
Then came 9th and Airtel Digital TV had its mega launcher advertisement, whose teasers had by now left none with curiosity of any kind. Though the advertisement is a multistarrer glam up, effectively overshadowing the little hints of its relation to the teasers shown randomly. So, in effect people could hardly associate the teasers with its ‘mother ship’ and BIG tv bagged all the (whatever little) publicity boost from those. Though somebody sensible would ponder over the relevance of a teaser campaign after the product had its launch. But given the poor launch and the miserable punchline anything else would be immensely adorable.
As Reliance played spoiler to Bharti telecom promo ventures, it became clear that at least for this while the marketing strategy of Airtel Digital TV was rather translucent. So the moral of the story is don’t use anything for a teaser which you can’t trademark (like a red couch).
