Axe and Pond’s new advertisements make bold, progressive statements

Long-format videos used to be much in favour with brands in the initial years of MTV and Channel V in the early 90s.
Ayushmann Khurrana in Axe's Ab Teri Baari ad.
Ayushmann Khurrana in Axe's Ab Teri Baari ad.

It is a spectacular music video featuring Ayushmann Khurrana, Naezy, Sunil Chhetri, Dharmesh Yelande and Shashank Arora that took social media by storm last week. Titled Ab Teri Baari, deodorant brand Axe has partnered OTT platform Arré to give a clarion call to Indian men to stop worrying about the rules of society and the everyday perennial question, Log Kya Kahenge? The video is rich on fluorescent graphics; well-scripted, well-enacted, well-choreographed-and well-presented. 

Long-format videos used to be much in favour with brands in the initial years of MTV and Channel V in the early 90s. Many of them would partner with singers and musicians to create video content that would resonate with younger audiences through a medium that was not really hard-sell. In fact, Coke Studio on MTV is the result of just such a brand initiative in the near past.

Then, somehow the trend kind of waned. YouTube had so much on offer that brands perhaps felt that any efforts to compete with whatever was already on offer, wasn’t really worth it. So, the new Axe video is the welcome revival of an old trend, perhaps precursor to many more. The song itself urges men to make their own rules. The brand tries to overcome the common belief that men in India feel an overwhelming pressure to conform to masculine stereotypes.

There are many said and unsaid rules on how to ‘Be a Man’ — the way you look, the way you act and the way you interact with your peers; even your career choices and hobbies are most often judged through the lens of being ‘masculine enough’. Ayushmann Khurrana, who has played award-winning gender-bending roles in Vicky Donor, Dum Laga Ke Haisha and Shubh Mangal Saavdhan is the main protagonist in the Axe video. He does his usual competent act on screen, but shines in the video more as a singer/rapper. Remember his haunting Paani Da Rang song putting to shade the real rapper Naezy (believed to be the one Ranveer aped in Gully Boy). Khurrana is a natural performer, and the Axe hip-hop narrative uses his multifarious talents musically and maximally.

On a similar vein this past week, another HUL brand, Pond’s, tried to do with women what Axe tried with the men. Except in this communication there is no celebrity involved. The new Pond’s campaign, See What Happens, is the gritty story of a young girl pursuing a passion in boxing. She deals with the dilemma (and guilt) of revealing this overwhelming passion of hers to her mother. She uses a cream to camouflage everyday the blows dealt by the opponent from her mother. And everyday, she tells her mother that she was in the college library, instead of revealing her boxing obsession. One day she finally she musters the courage to wash off the cream that hides her bruise and reveals to her mother that she’s training to be a boxer.  

The Pond’s film is nowhere in the class of the Axe video. The finesse is lacking. The drama is missing. The tension ‘within’ is not really palpable or visible. It is a good story, sans histrionics; which may actually not be such a bad idea though, because the film has a touch of honesty. The girl is just an ordinary girl who has set her heart on doing something that is not so ordinary.

Her dilemma, the desire not to make her mother panic, is also a very understandable common-man reaction. Actually, it is not as much ‘hiding’ from the mother as ‘protecting’ the mother from shock that makes the Pond’s communication real and worthy of empathy. But the most commendable part of the girl’s story is her mother’s reaction: the other girl’s face looks worse than yours, right? What a beautiful way of showing support and encouragement! 

Well, we live today in a world that is asking our young girls to go ahead and say what is on their minds and do what is in their hearts. Society is readying every single day for their bold moves. The time, says Pond’s, has come to go ahead and #SeeWhatHappens. The story in this commercial that merits thought is how a young girl who has the strength to take on the blows of boxing, cannot gather the strength to break the news to her mom. That is India. An India where courage and ambition are still tempered by tradition and societal norms.

It is nice to see a bellwether advertiser like HUL change its overall orientation to advertising in the past couple of years. Their advertising is increasingly progressive, challenges the status quo and tries hard to break with tradition. One has seen that with Surf, and with Brooke Bond also. Now with Axe and Pond’s too, the effort is for all to see. Hope brave new ideas continue to prevail!

(The author is a media and advertising veteran)

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