An important fixture in newspaper advertisements that only advertising industry professionals know about and appreciate is the dealer panel.
This is usually a horizontal section at the bottom of the ad that lists the dealers of the product being advertised above, with their phone numbers—and sometimes full addresses—so that the readers of the ad could know where to buy that product from.
In pan-Indian ads, this dealer panel is particularly a nightmare for the ad teams 🙂 Here is an example of how complex they are!
Assume there are 6-7 editions of the newspaper that the ad would be released in. Each region would need a different set of dealer details. So, the ad being released in Tamil Nadu editions of The Times of India would include the dealer names from Tamil Nadu, for instance. Even if the actual ad’s proofreading is done, there is an extra level of rigor needed in proof-reading the dealer details, to ensure they are accurate.
This is to do with print advertising.
Now, this dealer panel is making its way into digital ads!
Here is an example from Symphony air coolers where Shikhar Dhawan asks the viewer to buy the product from Chopra Electronics – Ambala, Electrovision – Vizag, Pooja Electronics – Bengaluru, and 2,300 more local stores across India!
Unlike print advertising efforts, the digital effort is a lot simpler, relatively speaking. Symphony got Rephrase.ai to clone the face and voice of Dhawan so that they can make the machine read out the names of 2,300 dealers!
But Symphony’s effort is not the first. Mondelez and Ogilvy did this first, called ‘Not Just A Cadbury Ad’, for 2020 Diwali, and repeated it with a variation for 2021 Diwali.
The 2020 Diwali ad campaign used digital geo-location to customize the ad we would see. Based on our location, the on-screen dealer/retailer names for the assorted products (opticals, jewellery, sarees, shoes, electronics, among others) being showcased in the ad’s story would change.
You may be wondering why Mondelez/Cadbury’s is selling all these products instead of chocolate 🙂 The ad also lists local retailers for us to buy Cadbury’s Celebrations as meetha for Diwali gifting.
The actual ad:
The campaign explained:
The 2021 Diwali campaign took it to another level – it has Shah Rukh Khan as the brand ambassador for local retailers across India as he mouths the retailers’ names as the store from where we could potentially buy shoes, clothes, sunglasses, smartphones, among others.
The actual ad:
The campaign explained:
The Symphony effort seems clunky compared to Cadbury’s efforts, at least in terms of the execution and finesse, production-wise. The latter has also won tons of advertising awards for both the agency and the client.
But this entire exercise around taking the dealer panel digital by inserting names of retailers through a cut-and-paste AI/cloning evokes a few questions.
1. The value of a dealer/retailer list?
The newspaper ad dealer panel is from a very different, older generation. Ad agencies and brands are still holding on to it because it has become part of an established process over the years. Allow me to question the very point of this exercise, now.
Ok, so you see an ad for air coolers in the newspaper. It’s summer. You think you could do with one in your living room. The ad has a tempting ‘summer special’ discount. What are you most likely to do?
(a) Look for the dealer in your area/town/city in the dealer panel below the ad, and call the phone number mentioned.
(b) Take your phone and search for ‘buy symphony air coolers near me’ (‘near me’ would be automatically added by Google, incidentally)
(c) Take your phone, open an e-commerce store app like Amazon or Flipkart and search for symphony air coolers
Option (a) is a vestige from the days of local yellow pages (remember them?) where we search for phone numbers of shops and retailers and call them before we land there physically. I have gone through the same process, for a Sony PSP back in 2011 and wrote about that experience too.
There are simpler, more effective ways to find out ‘a store near me that sells X’ these days, and this is one of the reasons why the yellow pages, as a concept, are dead.
So, what is the point of us being told about ‘Yashraj Optics in Nagarpatgiri Chowk’ or ‘Chopra Electronics in Ambala’ to buy something/anything? Just because we were spoon-fed a retailer’s name in our city/area, does it entice us to immediately jump at the store and buy something? Hardly.
Our interest in knowing the retailer where we can buy a product that is being advertised is secondary to us being interested and finding a need for the product. It is a piece of incidental information that we seek IF we find a pressing reason.
That brings me to the 2nd question.
2. Do these ads really sell the product(s)?
Is Cadbury’s Diwali 2020 ad engaging? In late 2020, we were going through a lot as a species, and this ad comes from a well-intended place. Given the sentiment back then—of supporting local stores because they were running in severe losses owing to successive, stringent lockdowns—it was a very odd, awkward Diwali. Amidst that scenario, this ad mined good-natured ‘giving’ emotions, seemed appropriate as a social share, and understandably went ‘viral’.
But if you look at it dispassionately, it’s more of a template to fit as many products as possible, including earrings, spectacle frame, saree, children’s watch, and Cadbury’s Celebrations gift pack. Selling even one thing through an ad is a tough ask, so selling 5 different, completely unrelated, disparate products in a single ad?
Imagine the full-page print equivalent of the same ad: a happy family portrait with a Diwali setting and 5 different products are called out with notes and arrows on where they are available, with the price marked against each. This is actually not out of the norm, but usually done by a single, large-format retailer like Shopper’s Stop of Lifestyle where all the products are available under a single roof! But imagine the same ad being released by Cadbury/Mondelez and taking people to 5 different retailers that are not familiar to them (unlike a well-known Lifestyle).
The 2021 Shah Rukh Khan Cadbury ad is on the same lines. A template to cram multiple products and multiple retailer names. The priority is not to sell us those products; the priority is to list retailers and win Diwali 2021 by being good-natured, in itself a good deed. But good intentions are just that – intentions. They don’t necessarily translate to good outcomes too, at least not at the level that they have been executed here.
Symphony’s ads are the worst among the lot, but they are well-intended too. I say worst because you need to consider the placement of the retailer names in the ad. It maps exactly like the print ad – at the bottom/end! Why is this significant? Think of the way you consume ads on YouTube (where these ads are placed, as per the brand and the agency). Our default behavior is to swat the ads away because they come in the way of our interest in some other content. We cannot do that on TV, but on YouTube, we get the option to skip ads. And the retailer’s name comes in the end, long after we would have skipped the ad!
Even if you assume that these are placed as unskippable ads, things don’t dramatically change. We see unskippable ads with disinterest; they are forcing us to finish them quickly and come in the way of what we really wanted to do. So, even if we hear Dhawan saying, ‘Buy this air cooler from Pooja Electronics, in Bengaluru’, why is that relevant to us? We aren’t even sold on the need for an air cooler in the first place (which takes multiple steps to manifest from interest generation to a need before we can start looking for dealer names), so loading us with the dealer names too seems hurried and forced.
3. Is there a point in the dealers generating their own custom ads?
The Cadbury campaign in 2021 included a website where dealers and even viewers can generate their own custom ads by adding their own details that would be fixed in the specific slots by the AI. That brings forth an interesting idea – Yashraj, who owns Yashraj Optics in Nagarpatgiri Chowk, can log on to the website, and generate his own ad where Shah Rukh Khan recommends Yashraj Optics to buy spectacle frames. And he gets that Yashraj-custom video via WhatsApp.
What does he do with it? Well, he can share it on WhatsApp with people he already knows and has their phone numbers. He could ask them to share it forward. They may. Does this help? Not entirely, if you think about it.
At best, it is a novelty item. India’s biggest superstar asking viewers to buy spectacle frames from Yashraj Optics in Nagarpatgiri Chowk is just that – a curiosity inducing AI-generated wonder. It is not a compelling call to action. Why? Because the ad would have already been seen by many, many people online – for them, getting it via Yashraj being a source is one more ad impression. They may not even sit through the entire ad again because it is just an ad to them. It may be a special ‘Not just a Cadbury ad’ to Cadbury/Mondelez, but seen from an audience’s perspective, it is just an ad; a cluttered, messy ad—however well-intended—that half-heartedly sells assorted, unrelated products through the voice of Shah Rukh Khan.
These ads don’t convey anything about why should we buy X from Yashraj Optics. They simply dig into the goodness of our hearts by saying ‘Let’s all help local stores’. That’s a good gesture (extremely well-timed in 2020 and 2021, at that), no doubt, but not a purposeful gesture for driving people towards these stores which are incidental details at best.
Ok, so those are the counterpoints to this AI-generated digital-dealer-panel idea started by Cadbury India and adopted by Symphony air coolers. How can they be done differently?
Here is a thought.
The starting point is to consider the purpose of the effort – it is to direct people towards stores near them.
It is not to drive people towards specific stores that are enlisted with the companies as official retailers. This became the primary purpose in the backdrop of the COVID-induced misery in 2020 and 2021. But that well-intended objective forgets that people may not do what they are being asked to and do what is convenient to them, particularly during the COVID period, particularly with low-value products that they can otherwise easily order online too, particularly through an ad they are watching online on a mobile phone!
The other point is to realize that the ads are not content with selling a product; they are not even selling multiple products, but they are also telling people how to get them and this method is an offline method!
And most importantly, the ads don’t even convey why you should buy new spectacle frames from Yashraj Optics in Nagarpatgiri Chowk (whether you need them or not, that’s a different point altogether). The ad simply assumes that we’re all good people and would dutifully follow what the good-natured ad tells us to do. That’s nice on paper but isn’t real.
Bottomline: the ads need to sell the retailer too, as much as they sell us the need for a product. But this works only for products that we cannot order online, and Cadbury Celebrations is one such product that can effortlessly be ordered online and home-delivered. This may work for non-low-value products that we may need to spend some time before deciding on a purchase.
Imagine this: Dhawan adds in the Symphony ad, “Call 9900x9900x to get a special 5% off on Symphony air coolers from Chopra Electronics, Ambala!”. That sweetens the deal for the retailer too and gives us a reason to call. But this may also need the brand to manage the process centrally, instead of merely pointing to a dealer name. Instead of multiple phone numbers, a single number, managed centrally, could direct calls as per the location and get the local dealer to handle the fulfilment and delivery process.
Think of other variants where the call-to-action is to book the cooler online for home delivery via Chopra Electronics, Ambala without the need for us to visit the dealer. Or the deal is a free gift worth Rs.X.
But this addition needs to be placed in a way such that they don’t simply book-end the ad online, else we miss them while skipping the otherwise banal ad.
Also, selling multiple products in the same ad is a bad idea no matter how noble the intention is. Symphony at least gets the focus right.