Unconventional advertising is something that brands are resorting to these days. A child grows up looking up to his favorite sportspersons, aiming to someday become like them. Every person, sports fan or has a connection to the sportsmen on an emotional level. This connection with the masses comes in handy for the brands while grabbing sportsmen for brand endorsements.

Recent times have seen a large number of sportsmen becoming brand ambassadors for sports brands. Also, for brands that do not have any remote connections to sports or anything athletic. These advertisements come as no surprise, do well in the market.

Hopping onto the bandwagon of successful advertisements featuring sports-persons is CRED’s “Great for good”. Cred is a credit card bill payment platform that offers rewards to its users to pay their bills on time. CRED’s recent ad features Rahul Dravid losing his temper amidst traffic. Rahul Dravid is much known for his calm and peaceful demeanor. This advertisement however portrayed the other side of the cricketer.

Unconventional advertising at its best

The 23-second ad starts with actor Jim Sarbh telling us that CRED gives CRED coins after payment of credit card bills. He also says that through this platform customers can use CRED coins to claim cashback and rewards. The actor then goes on to say that it sounds ridiculous just like saying Rahul Dravid has anger issues. The next frame shows Rahul Dravid losing his temper in traffic. He is yelling out things like he’ll smack someone’s head and “Indiranagar ka Gunda hoon main”.

CRED logo

With the growth of digital media, the scope of sports and storytelling has gotten wider, sportsmen have been making appearances in different forms of storytelling. At first, the masses knew the sportsmen with their performances on the field. Now, they have started creating an emotional connection with them. Also, having the same hopes of winning, living the life of the team with them.

But since the advent of digital and social media, the masses are connected emotionally with the lives of sportspersons even outside the field, through their social media handles, through ads, appearances in television shows, through all kinds of endorsements they make of the products and services they trust.

ENDORSEMENT BY A FAMOUS PERSONALITY

 Communication has become easier, endorsements of brands through these sportspersons have also become easier. But easier does not mean it is not effective. Endorsements through sportspersons are as effective as it ever was.

Rahul Dravid’s effortless acting is hilarious and fun to watch at the same time. You’ll catch yourself replaying the 23-second ad again and again just to see Rahul lose his temper and go about shouting and breaking car mirrors with his bat.

Rahul Dravid

He is a name known in every household in India for more than 2 decades now. It was difficult even to imagine such a calm person getting agitated and enraged. But I guess Bangalore traffic does that to people? Even the most patient people end up losing it.

This commercial hit the right spot on a lot of aspects.

EMOTIONAL MARKETING

Emotional marketing is a strategy used by brands in endorsements and advertisements to connect with the viewers on an emotional level, this they do so that the viewers retain the advertisements in their mind for a longer period. In this advertisement the emotion used is happiness.

The utter hilarity of the advertisement birthed a lot of laughter from all over, connecting the people to the brand with positive emotions. And so the next time consumers and potential consumers come across the brand, they will be reminded of the positive emotion of happiness, increasing the chances of them engaging with the brand.

INITIATING THE REPEL EFFECT

The advertisement spurred with a repel effect, brands like Zomato and Amul hopped on right after the CRED ad went viral to take their spin on it.

Zomato as a reply to the ad tweeted “deliveries in Indiranagar might be late today due to an angry gunda on the road.” which some users took rather too seriously and Zomato had to clarify it with another tweet that read “It has come to our attention that some people took this too seriously. There is no Gunda on the roads, there might be a wall tho (sic).”

Amul hopped in on the trend next and came up with an ad featuring a very happy avatar of Dravid on the sunroof of his car with his bat in one hand. The ad read “Jammy is raging? Butter is calming..”

Unconventional advertising brands

UNCONVENTIONAL ADVERTISING LEADS TO MEME FEST

The hilarity didn’t stop with the ad and tweets, the ad soon became a meme, and boy they didn’t stop coming. Raging Rahul became a meme template, with his calm side on one side and his enraged side on the other. “Indiranagar ka Gunda hoon main” is a phrase known by everyone today.

CRED memes

CRED has used a very unconventional method of advertising with this commercial. The intention was to sell the commercial rather than the product directly. They did a very good job at that, the ad has gone viral!!

This unconventional method revolves around the idea that the brand must be seen and heard by the potential buyers, awareness of the product will eventually result in more sales. The more successful the ad, the more successfully it will sell.

CONCLUSION

This advertisement seamlessly and effortlessly portrayed something unprecedented, taking aback the users but also made them come back for more. This advertisement stirred social media. The strategy used by CRED to prima facie sell the ad and not the product worked beautifully and the threads of memes generated after the ad helped it a lot to gain more views. 

Last but not least how can we forget to mention how Rahul Dravid so effortlessly pulled off acting? If we didn’t know better, about the gem of a person he is, so calm and composed, we would end up thinking for a second that he lost it there.

In its entirety, this advertisement is a good mix of hilarity, fun, and connecting with the masses. This mix made the ad successful and left viewers with a positive feeling about the brand, hence increasing the brand value.

Contact Realm Studios for that expert advice that is going to emotionally connect your product/service to your customer. What are you waiting for?