By: Yohan P Chawla
Tap to pay with Visa is their new campaign which was recently launched across major digital platforms and a similar TVC too has been playing across various television channels. Shamsuddin Jasani-led Isobar India has created the campaign and I caught up with the group MD, Isobar South Asia, who is fondly known as Shams, and Isobar’s NCD Anish Varghese for a brief chat on the same.
Sharing his excitement and happiness, Jasani said, “I am very proud of what the team has done as far as the Visa campaign is concerned. I think it’s a clear evolution of where Isobar is today from where it was a few years back. Clients are seeing the value we are adding. Our thinking, ideas, strategy and concepts are not boxed into saying that we are either digital or traditional. We think of ideas first — of course with digital and technology as a core to it, but not restricted by it.”
“We have made a brand film for Marks and Spencer, so it’s not a one-off; it’s something which we consistently as an agency have been doing… transcending media boundaries, and that, really, is our focus.”
“We are the agency for the digital age, but we no longer call ourselves a digital agency because of our strengths now — which is clearly visible in our ideas, thoughts and executions, ” Jasani said. ” We can take a more strategic role with our clients. I am not saying that it’s easy to make a TVC, but the format is fixed. There isn’t very big change in the format as well as far as the TVCs go. There is just the changing of the duration of the ad, not in terms of the format.
“So in that regard, it’s an easier way to think about a film from a TVC perspective. When you are thinking about digital it has so many renditions of it — be it long-format or short-format videos. A two-seconder on Facebook versus a seven-seconder on YouTube versus a thirty-seconder versus a horizontal video versus a vertical video. So there are so many different ways of executing and not just ways but one needs to execute it differently for different mediums and needs to be platform-agnostic.”
“The Visa campaign starts from an insight, tap to pay, and how tapping is a very subconscious action. Anish will elaborate more on that.”
“The brief, ” said Anish,”was pretty simple, Visa was launching a new card with a tap to pay feature.”
“Being an Indian, tapping is in our culture. We started thinking as to how we could marry the tapping behavior with the card’s new feature. As per the data shared by Visa, we observed that maximum card payments happening in India were under INR 2000. So that is why they came up with the tap to pay feature, which allows you to pay in just a tap.”
I asked Anish whether Tap was the first choice or there were other ideas too which were being discussed. He answered, “Tap was not obvious. There were other thoughts as well, but we felt that Tap was the best suited route for this campaign as it could connect with that behavioral change and we needed something every person could relate to. The client appreciated this thought.”
In how Visa’s campaign helped Isobar’s business, Varghese said, “Another important point here is that this campaign had the scalability factor. After Visa there are now close to 10 more films we are making.”
On the execution front, Varghese said, “Normally when a mainline advertising agency executes a campaign for a brand, they first make a TVC and then for digital they simply chop and edit the main TVC into a five-seconder or whatever, depending on the requirement. Many times, this makes the concept lose its essence.”
“However, what Isobar did differently,” Vargehse said, “was that while we were scripting the commercial, we made multiple scripts for various formats. A different seven-seconder script and a different five-seconder script, and accordingly, we shot as per the scripts. All of this was possible because of the experience learnings we have gathered in twenty years.”
