“A major mistake brands do is to either copy or ignore what their competition is doing.” – Devang Mehta

“Each campaign should only have one clear-cut objective. Macro division of objective can be a Branding campaign versus Performance campaign. 

Don’t try to achieve both with the same campaign. Believe me, you may end up achieving none.”

 – Devang Mehta, Head Marketing, Anand Rathi

Anand Rathi’s “Plan for you” campaign seems to be an interesting approach to reaching out to prospects and celebrating their 25+ year journey. 

The campaign has 8 short ads with each ad targeting a different micro-segment. In terms of creativity, ads are simple yet effective.

We talked to Devang to learn the story behind making these video ads. Read on.

1. What is Anand Rathi’s internal process of creating an ad campaign?

At Anand Rathi, we have built a CMT (Central Marketing Team) and BMT (Business Marketing Team) system. 

The CMT has a marketing executive as well as designers and video editors and this team functions like an in-house Marketing consultant cum Creative agency to all our business verticals including Investment Services, Wealth Management, Insurance Broking, Investment Banking, Institutional Equities, NBFC, OFA, and Women-centric Investment arm – LXME.

We follow a simple yet streamlined process regarding new campaign creation. 

Step 1: Understanding the business requirement, where we talk to the business, understand the exact requirement, make a problem statement, and then turn it into an internal brief of what needs to be made.

Step 2: It’s the step where the Marketing Executive brainstorms various ideas within CMT, surfs the internet and gets reference images/videos, creates a draft framework of the campaign in ppt, and presents it to the business with costs (if any for images/stock videos, etc).

Step 3: Finalizing the media and platforms where the campaign should be published.

Step 4 : Creation of the actual campaign & various assets and execution of the campaign as per the pre-decided marketing calendar.

Step 5 : Monitoring, optimizing, and reports stage, where we optimize the campaign and try to get the best results and share the reports with businesses. 

2. What was your thought process when you were planning the campaign – “Plan for you”? 

When it comes to Anand Rathi, ‘Plan for you’ is a very special campaign. It is made to celebrate our 25+ years milestone in the Financial Industry. 

We felt the best way to celebrate the milestone was to come up with an integrated video campaign that could bring out our core speciality as a group, which is financial planning. 

‘Plan for you’ campaign is a series of thumb-stopping, quirky, topical, and crisp 15 second videos that deliver our core message in a fun manner. 

Our campaign brings out various types of cricket fans/types of Investors. Cricket fans in a way depict various types of Investors and the common attributes that fans and Investors have like being hopeful, aggressive, Tip believer and so on. 

It also delivers our core message that no matter which type of fan/investor you are, we have a plan for you. 

The campaign has been strategically created and placed to capitalize on the cricket fever across India due to IPL. Right from the scripts, ambience, characters, as well as their attire, have been thoughtfully crafted to depict cricket. 

Even the release of most of the ads is timed with the actual team playing cricket on a particular day.

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3. How did you conceptualize the campaign?

For conceptualizing the campaign, we joined hands with Communications startup Wondrlab. 

We wanted an agile team that could build our equity and weave in our brand’s values, but at the same time, create a campaign that would go viral. Wondrlab managed this balance perfectly. 

Our brief to them was very simple – We have completed 25 years in financial solutions and have the expertise to create tailored plans for every type of Investor out there and we want this essence to come out through the campaign. 

They came up with multiple campaign ideas (a few very courageous and dramatic) and after multiple rounds of evaluations with all internal stakeholders, we went ahead with the ‘Plan for you’ campaign.

‘Plan for you’ is a digital-first campaign that has been created for Digital and has been extended to TV instead of the other way around which is generally done by major brands. 

The media plan and release were well coordinated with cricket matches happening on any particular day and the ads were disseminated through OTT platforms, Social media, financial websites, and TV. 

4.  What best practices do you follow when it comes to executing video ads?  

 Video ads are one of the best mediums available today, through which a Brand can convey a story and embed their product and service in it. 

However the digital behaviour of users is changing dramatically, the attention span of users is the lowest ever, and also there is a war between brands to get space in the user’s minds. 

With this kind of dynamic digital environment, your ads need to be like street performers. They have to occupy a crowded space and try to catch attention as soon as possible. The video ads have to be short and too good to ignore or scroll.

We follow a few basic principles to make sure our ads get the attention they deserve.

a) Keep it short and try to grab attention early: With the user’s attention span being as low as 5-6 seconds, we prefer short and crisp ads that not only grab attention but also make the viewer stay right till the end of the ad.

b) Throughout Branding: With shorter ads, comes shorter Brand visibility. When the ads are short and crisp, revealing the brand logo at the end should not be an option. In our ads, our brand logo stays throughout the ad on the left top giving us 100% Brand visibility.

c) Have Subtitles: Today, nearly 85% of videos on FB are played in mute mode. Most other social platforms also autoplay videos when you scroll but in mute mode. This makes subtitles insanely important. Either your ad should be complete and understandable without sound or should have subtitles. 

d) Mobile First: When producing the ads, make sure all your camera angles, cuts, frames, etc are designed keeping mobile viewing in mind. Fast or too many cuts, too many elements in each frame, minor nuances, small fonts, etc is a strict no-no when creating something for Mobile viewing.

e) Have a clear CTA: Clear CTA means less junk in your LMS. If your ads do not have a clear CTA, people tend to click on them for no reason and eventually, you end up having unwanted leads.  

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5. What mistakes Marketers and Businesses should avoid when it comes to planning ad campaigns?

Every Marketer has a different set of mistakes that they have learned from. 

Here are the mistakes that I have learned from and should be avoided while planning and or executing any campaign.

1.Having multiple objectives: Many brands make the mistake of having multiple objectives while planning campaigns. 

Each campaign should only have one clear-cut objective. The Macro division of objective can be a Branding campaign versus a Performance campaign. 

You should understand that leads would be a by-product of a Branding Campaign and vice versa. 

Don’t try to achieve both with the same campaign. Believe me, you may end up achieving none.

2. Copying / Ignoring Competition: Another major mistake many brands do is to either copy what the competition is doing or ignore what their competition is up to. 

As a marketer, you must track what your competition is doing not with the sense of copying them but to be informed and learn from their success and failures.

3. Trying to create one campaign that appeals to everyone: It is very important to know your target audience. 

Their age, their location, their life stage, their tech usage, and their behavioural traits. 

If you know your customers, you will know that each one of them is different. You can club people with similar attributes in common segments but still, you may end up with multiple segments. 

This makes it clear that it is difficult to have one campaign that would have the right message and would appeal to every segment. 

Always create audience-specific campaigns and run them digitally with respective targeting for the best results.

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6. Please name the team behind this campaign.

The Plan for You campaign was spearheaded by a core team that includes 

Priti Rathi Gupta (MD, Anand Rathi Share and Stock Brokers Ltd and Founder of LXME), 

Amit Rathi (MD, Anand Rathi Wealth Management), 

Myself, Devang Mehta (Head of Marketing for Anand Rathi Group), 

Ashley Almeida (Associate Director, Anand Rathi Wealth Management). 

For execution, the core team was well assisted by other members of the Marketing team including Kapil Sharma, Kartik Waghela, Lilly Geddam, Umesh Choudhary, and Prashant Kasbe.

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About Devang (in his own words)

Born and brought up in a Gujarati middle-class family in a (then) remote place called Bhayander on the outskirts of Mumbai. 

I finished my schooling at Holy Cross High School. Being born into a middle-class family with limited resources had its benefits. 

The value of money was instilled in me and my brother right from our childhood days. In my childhood, I would finish school and would go to my father’s printing press to help him learn. 

A freelance designer used to visit the office every day and I used to sit behind and see the magic he would create on the computer. 

He would start with a blank white file and would convert it into fascinating brochures, catalogue fliers, etc. I could see the whole work right from scratch to the final printed collateral. 

This is what laid the seed of creativity in me. I was so fascinated by computers and graphic software, that I would wait for the freelance designer to leave so that I could try what I saw. 

With trial and error, I learned almost every software needed for designing right during my childhood.

As I said, I was born into a financially tight Gujarati family, we (me and my brother) had to support our own pocket money at times. 

To no surprise, I have worked part-time after school for a few years on an ISD Telephone Booth as a telephone operator during my school days to earn Rs 400 per month. 

During college, I worked part-time as a sales field executive and sold varied products right from Petro cards by Bharat Petroleum, to Nightingale books in Archie’s to Quality Walls ice-creams and so on. 

I even did freelance designing and helped my father in his business while I completed my Bachelor in Commerce. 

I did my MBA in Marketing from ICFAI. There is a separate story behind why I did an MBA (despite me not being very studious), but let’s skip that in the best interest of our readers here. 

My first full-time job was with a company called Dawnay Day AV which was later called Destimoney. Post-Destimoney, I ventured into entrepreneurship and founded ‘Pencil to Pixel’ – A creative agency offering Marketing, Branding, and Media buying services to National and a few International clients. 

After spending nearly 5 years at Pencil to Pixel, I forayed back to corporates and joined Fast Track Housing Finance. 

After a small stint of 6 months at Fasttrack, I moved on to Motilal Oswal Financial Service, and today I am with Anand Rathi Group, heading their Marketing & Branding function.

About VidSaga

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