Creating God Particle: Making an advertisement work

Recession has once again asked a fundamental question for marketers: Is it the best time to market more and increase sales or is it the time for showing restraint and controlling the marketing budget. Nevertheless, while the answer to this might remain oblivious, there is no doubt about one pressure that marketers face: Create ever lasting advertisements, those which stand the test of time. This will help the company multi-fold: on one hand leading to lesser marketing spends , on the other hand enhancing the brand recall for the firm leading to a win-win situation.

Ever wondered why Vodafone’s ZooZoo and Kolaveri Di became viral ? What really differentiates them from millions of ads created worldwide annually that don’t make the cut and die after the initial launch. There are major brands that have failed in their advertising strategy while there are smaller brands that succeed at times in creating such everlasting ads. The answer to it lies in the presence of a so-called magic formula also referred as “God” particle by some advertisers.

God particle refers to the ability of an advertisement to increase its reach across mediums and with time. It is almost like an infinite geometric progression with sometimes an increasing ratio. The God particle is created in a very simple way. For one instance let’s not look at advertisement as a promotion of a product but as the product itself. Just like any other product, a good advertisement gets more popular among the audience as it seems to create some sense of value, pleasure or knowledge for the consumer who in turn act as the self appointed PR executives for the brand by sharing and referring the ad, leading to the creation of the so-called God particle. Advertisements that don’t create this value in consumers mind fail to perform and need to be replaced by a new campaign. Another major factor that makes a campaign a huge success is the timing of the launch. For instance, the Zoozoo campaign was launched at the peak of the IPL fever in India.

Ad campaigns like Dove evolve and Zoozoos that got viral had this ingredient in common, whereas the Happy Dent commercial though recognized as one of the most creative ads failed to make it viral. If we move back nearly two decades, a period when the Cadbury’s “Kuch khaas hain Zindagi mein” advertisement still gets a considerable number of hits on youtube and has tremendous brand recall among the consumers. Social media has provided an important tool for advertisements to go viral, however traditional media like Television cannot be ruled out especially in a country where internet penetration is still largely low. The very aspect that marketers need to look at is advertisement itself is a product trying to sell another product and not as a medium to sell a product. If this perception is considered while designing an advertisement, chances of an advertisement creating the God Particle for itself will be tremendously high- let’s hope we get to see many more Kolaveri Di’s in the Indian advertising space.