ET NOW : Counterintuitive TVCs?

ET NOW has recently released a chain of 3 ads for their business news channel, with the core punchline – ‘Always thinking markets‘. After watching all the three ads, my first reaction was that the ads were surprisingly counterintuitive to the very product that was being advertised!

First, have a look at the commercials:

The other commercials can be seen on the following links:  TVC 2 (Pharma) ; TVC 3 (Gold)

There are some points I wish to make about the campaign:

1) Primary Message:

I think the intent was to bring out the concept that ET NOW is a 24-hour business channel, and you can get authentic and educated business/stock information anytime.

What came out was – ET NOW is super-addictive, to the extent that the person who watches it is just glued on to the TV, and spends day-in and day-out doing just that. It sends out the unflattering message that the viewership of the channel is composed of nerds who have no life of their own apart from gathering business news and stock market updates – not a good message to send out to your TG. You don’t want to tell them that they join an ‘elite’ group of nerds when they watch ET Now!

2) Brand Recall

I think I harp on about prioritizing brand recall over ad recall in every other post that I write! Even in this TVC, the ad recall is pretty high due to the humour content, but the brand name, ET Now, does not linger on after the ad. I was just surfing through the channels on my TV, and found 10 to 15 business news channels! How do you expect a recall? Did you differentiate your product from others in the category? – The answer is No!.

3) Brand disocciation?

The answer above about differentiation is a pretty sad answer given that ET Now was backed by a very strong legacy of ET print newspaper which enjoys a very positive brand equity. Why couldn’t that be leveraged? Even if you want to disconnect your brands a little, you should only aim to communicate  that one complements the other – if you send out a message that either of the two can serve the TG’s need, then rest assured that the TG will always pick a 30-45 minute browse-through of a printed newspaper than spending 24 hrs watching your channel!

While ET Now did take a brave step forward by advertising a business news channel all across prime time television, the scripting of the ad left much to be desired.