The pipeline of communications has shifted from the towncriers on bullock carts to, among digital and other mediums including massive double-side mainline newspaper jackets, but come festive-season sales time, and both have essentially screamed themselves hoarse about the exact same thing – the discounts and the great happiness a brand wanting to offload into consumer homes, promises.
Only, this festive season, one creative and budgetary shortcut adopted by two major brands in India, LG and Whirlpool, has landed both in a whirlpool of collective disbelief amongst both, consumers and the marketing professionals.
Reason? Large, festive-season sales ads both brands released in the Times of India. Both large brands used a composite picture of a happy family of smiling young parents and two beautiful children with their ads – the LG ad headline read: “India’s Largest TV Manufacturer, Now India’s Most Trusted Television Brand”; Whirlpool’s ad was headlined “Golden Diwali Offer” with the strapline, “Get an assured 0.5kg Gold Coin”. But the lead, happy-family image both used was the same picture! With this unpardonable faux-pas, mistake, error, blunder, call it what you will, the dangers of the lack of time to market, or the interference of the finance teams to pare ad budgets, or the lack of care and attention to detail print ads today command and get… all came home to roost.
Now it might be said that only those who see and register both ads would balk, but then, remember, these are directly competing for brands, and both sides have marketing planners and media buyers who would have studied every rival’s past media buys and would have placed their ads to ensure they come up against their rivals directly, during the festive season, at much the same consumer hangouts.
We reached out to marketing and advertising professionals to find out what they have to say about this major goof-up. Here’s what they told us:
Ajay Gahlaut, MD & Chief Creative Officer Publicis Worldwide India: “I don’t think this is a good thing, I believe while there is an acceptance and knowledge that print is an excellent medium to advertise in despite all the channels that have come in somehow we have lost full craft totally.
“Somehow clients seem to have lost the desire to see good print work happening. Print ads are not cheap so I don’t know why this is happening. But the focus on print seems to have just gone and there are lots of clients who say that they don’t have the money to shoot the pictures, but have the money to take out an ad in a national daily and that doesn’t come cheap, but in the production of the ad they don’t want to spend any money on a proper shoot.”
Gahlaut lamented that technology was diverting clients from the essentially inherent and proven power of print. “The immense power of print, I think, is being overlooked when especially clients seem to be getting diverted by technology, all the attention seems to be going there,” Gahlaut said, adding, “A perfectly good, and an amazingly reliable medium, which has been there for years, tried and tested, is being ignored to such an extent that nobody is putting in enough rigor to figure out that the same visual is being used by two different brands’ communication.”
Ramesh Narayan
Ramesh Narayan, Founder Canco Advertising, said, “We’ve heard of cross badging products like the Suzuki Baleno and the Toyota Glanza. Here’s an all-new low in creative advertising. Whirlpool and LG use the same photograph for their advertising. Lazy advertising, freak coincidence or double sale by stock-shot vendor? In any case someone’s going to do a lot of explaining.”
Harish Bijoor, Brand- expert & Founder, Harish Bijoor Consults Inc, said, “Ouch! This is a terrible thing to happen to any brand, particularly to brands in the same category wanting to stand out and be different. And look different.”
“Brands,” said Bijoor, “are obviously in a hurry at festival time, and the short cut to pick stick pictures seems to have been taken. In the bargain both brands have the muck of parity in visuals on their faces. Fortunately LG has enhanced its picture digitally, which Whirlpool has not!”
Pradeep Dwivedi, Founder & CEO, Divitiae IN, said, “These are both very reputed international brands and obviously have creative and marketing communication teams that are focused on working with agencies to create the right kind of messaging.”
“I think this was a sheer coincidence that stock photos procured by them got published alongside and obviously one can reasonably be sure that a client would deliberately not use a graphic which has been used in multiple publications at the same time. So clearly there is a factor of chance that has got prevailed into it.”
“I think the only learning there is that you should use own or rather customized creative which is mandated for you rather than using stock images, especially you are working for a large client,” Dwivedi said.
Sumanto Chattopadhyay, Chairman and CCO, 82.5 Communications, said, “This sort of mistake can happen quite easily, because everyone has access to the same images and they don’t always know if another brand is using it as well. Shooting an original picture isn’t necessarily cost-effective, so brands resort to stock.”
Sathyamurthy Namakkal, Executive Director – DDB Mudra Group, said, “Simple human error I guess! Also an average consumer may not even notice it, as I didn’t.”
Virendra Saini
Virendra Saini, Executive Director, Triton Communications said, “As this might be a festive one-off ad, one generally wouldn’t do a photoshoot and therefore resort to using a stock image. However, to avoid such glitches, one should buy the rights of the stock image being used, for 6 months to a year or for the least period allowed. I don’t think this has anything to do with the slowdown at all.”
Dhunji S Wadia
Dhunji Wadia, Former President, Rediffusion, on Facebook said, “Don’t understand this controversy about one family in the same posture in 2 ads. One is for cooking appliances, the other is for TV. Can’t one happy family buy different brands?”
Abhishek Joshi, Head, Marketing MX Player, on Twitter said, “This is an #advertising blasphemy… 2 competing brands using the same stock image I their respective ads!! I would be shitting bricks if I was the brand manager in any one of these brands.”
Tagging the official twitter handles of Whirlpool, LG India and Getty Images, Joshi said, “Please spend and shoot guys rather than buy stock!”
Shashank Lanjekar, Head, Strategy Planning, Taproot Denstu, said, “All this happened because the checks and balances on such things have considerably reduced at the supplier end. For example a royalty-free image without exclusivity read ‘cheaper’ can very well be utilized by multiple brands at different points in time. This has come to light mainly because it’s happened in the same category at the same point in time. And honestly, it’s no big deal from the consumers’ perspective.”
“These are things that our industry takes more seriously than necessary. Ask yourself this, what’s the probability that an average consumer would ever find out if two brands had the same font? More importantly, does he care even if he finds out?”
“It’s a simple error of omission”, says Lanjekar, continuing,“ which doesn’t even feature as an issue in my mind.”
Republic TV’s Digital Revenue Head Varun Mohan took a potshot at the fiasco with his FB Post stating, “Impact of market slow down, brands got no money for photoshoot?”
Same image in ads of 2 competitive brands. This is what happens when creative agency look for cheaper stock images.” added Varun
Medianews4u view: Stock shots save a lot of time and expense, and there are several major providers of stock images. But if a stock shot has to be used for a one-off, tactical, sale-time ad, the onus is on both, the buyer and the seller of the stock shot, to ensure that it is bought/sold in an exclusive deal that keeps out a list of competing brands during a time period of say, one month or more, with a declaration from the seller to the effect. Be safe than sorry.
