Keeping it simple

How the idea that ‘barriers are what you make of them’ helped make the Airtel ad a winner


Telecom firm Bharti Airtel Ltd’s new television ad, which topped Mint’s monthly ad survey, was created by Rediffusion DY&R Pvt. Ltd. Amitesh Rao, its national business head, explains how the campaign took shape.

What was the client’s brief?We wanted a campaign that would go way beyond the kind of communication we have been seeing in this sector. In the past, Airtel campaigns had underlined the power of expression, such as the one featuring world leaders. There was a need to produce an iconic campaign like that. A campaign that has stature and scale, and establishes the brand's credentials beyond product and service. So, the brief essentially was to convey the thought: Communication dissolves boundaries.
How did you zero in on the script?This campaign is not about a particular situation or context, it is about people. So we picked a neutral context, which would not lend itself to any association, and focused on the core idea. The original script went through a lot of editing. It started out as a fairly complicated script around these two little boys from countries which were at war with each other and with fathers who felt strongly about the situation. We explored several routes but at the end, the only thing that mattered was the simplicity of the message.In the end, we took everything but the two kids out of the script.
Some say featuring teenagers who knew the significance of those boundaries could have strengthened the message. Comment.If we had used teenagers, then it would come across as a conscious decision to communicate, to build bridges. But we wanted to focus on the idea that “barriers are what you make of them”. And to a little kid, the space between those two boundaries looked like a good place for a game of football. It is a pure thought, there is no construction behind it. They are clueless, and their actions are spontaneous, none of them are thinking like Miss World and consciously communicating to bring world peace.