How to be wrong while trying to be very right

There are two contrasting ways of looking at the TVS Apache spot.

One is the technical correctness. The spot is more about youth than about a bike. It tries to break bike advertising paradigm. It’s not about clichés and stereotypes of power, mileage, looks, maleness and individuality any longer. It’s about a gang of friends, hanging out, tribalism. It’s about scoffing at the mature and ‘settled’ [read old], which young people don’t like to be. Bang on. If you look at the commercial once and want to write a quick review about it, this is what you will write.

If you take the top layer off, however, the sheen is gone and the grime starts to show. The Apache is a powerful bike, not a moped. Bikes, particularly performance ones, are about boys. It’s about the individual who belongs to a tribe, because of the shared passion of the members. It’s not about a group of faceless individuals. Girls certainly don’t have place in it, let alone a prominent place. On the pillion, probably; but not in the foreground. Sounds chauvinistic? To the feminist in me, putting a girl in the foreground actually sounds patronizing and cheap. And certainly not effective.

Undifferentiated irreverence is about the entire youth, not only boys. That’s why it works for Pepsi, not for TVS. This spot has no strong audience connect, but misses out completely on category relevance.

There is a silver lining, probably an accident. The execution of the irreverence, to me looks like the innate scoff of the youth at the inevitability of ‘settling down’. It’s about enjoying life while it lasts, the true import of ‘now or never’. I recall the old Amit Kumar rendered Kasme Vaade song- ‘abhi zindagi ka le le mazaa, kal kya hoga kisko pata?’. Very youth, very today, very urgency evoking. If only the ‘me and my bike’ were to be integrated with that, it would have been a powerful combination of a life insight and category relevance. A ‘Dhoom’ style tribalism in execution would have been apt as a background; and would have actually added to the flavour.

• The Strategy:** I wish I knew the actual strategy TVS was following, to be able to comment on it. Elsewhere in media, I have read the creative agency’s claim that it was ‘trying to appeal to collective consciousness of youngsters’. Replace ‘youngsters’ with ‘boys’ and you would have got a winner. I find trying to be ‘affiliative’ short on insights vis-a-vis boys and bikes.
• The Idea:*** As explained earlier, scoff of the inevitability and tribalism of youth, are both strong ideas; but I think they have been integrated sub optimally.
• The Execution:**** The execution is good and the spot is very watchable. I just wonder whether it has become too universally likeable, to have a strong audience specificity and affinity. But that is the responsibility of strategy, not execution.
• Overall Impact:** Average, with a lot of lost opportunity, I would say.

In summary, I personally like the attempt by an underdog the take some risks and break the paradigm. I just wish the category context and relevance were respected by the account planner. That way the attempt to be right would not have ended up actually being wrong.

[Published in DNA on August 12th, 2006]