The latest BigBasket campaign featuring a kid endorsing the brand seems to have not amused the audience. On YouTube, the comments section below the ad sums it up as ‘irritating’, a sentiment that has resonated among my peers as well.
Certain comments on YouTube even asked the brand to take the ad down, because a little kid was being subjected to the ire of the online public.
The appearance of the kid is not and should not be the problem. But what the brand got wrong was the execution of the campaign.
The route is pretty simple. There’s a know-it-all kid, who first shares a random trivia — like chewing bread while chopping onion can prevent watery eyes— and in the same breath, recommends BigBasket’s 15-30 minute delivery to his family members. But that’s the thing–nobody likes a ‘know-it-all, especially if it’s a kid.
It’s the case of yet another brand that wants its name and functionality spelt out in a 30-second commercials, and this time it has come at the cost of losing the ‘cute’ factor of featuring a child artist to endorse a service that has no value for a kid that small.
Forcing the name and utility of the brand at the core of the script instead of limiting it to the epilogue call-to-action adversely affects the quality of the script, and the brand ends up losing on establishing a connection with its target audience. It’s a general problem in advertising nowadays. Because attention span is short, brands insist their name to be spelt out in the script. It seems BigBasket too made a similar demand of their agency.
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Kids in ads
From cars to insurance, kids have long been featured in commercials for products they had nothing to do with, so BigBasket can’t be blamed for choosing a kid as a protagonist.
But it’s how you use a child artist that matters. Take for example the classic Dhara ad, where a boy runs away from the house, only to be lured back in by fresh jalebis fried in Dhara. The beauty of that ad is the innocence of the kid, and the fact that most of us feel the same about jalebis. The kid never endorses Dhara outrightly – the functionality/importance of the product comes in later.
The same can be said about Surf Excel’s iconic ‘daag ache hain’ campaign, where the kids have fun and play without caring about spoiling their clothes. What if a kid explicitly stated they enjoy this freedom because Surf Excel will take care of the stains?
The problem of the BigBasket ad lies in lousy writing and terrible direction. Unfortunately, a kid is becoming collateral damage because people are not responding well to a badly executed campaign.
(Edited by Anurag Chaubey)