Classplus and Saurav Ganguly: brilliant teaser, underwhelming reveal

While ad agencies get to talk extensively about their thought process and creativity, PR agencies are rarely able to explain the thought process behind getting the attention of people or the media using creativity.

This is primarily because advertising is paid for and PR is earned.

That is, an ad is simply placed in a media vehicle for a fee; there is no convincing required for the media – it’s a simple transaction. In the case of PR, the PR professional needs to pitch a client’s message and need to convince a media professional to be interested, and then, she/he would get a chance to see the client’s story being mentioned in a news article.

Barring PR awards, very less is usually written or discussed the thought process behind a pitch note prepared by a PR agency, or the efforts and relationships nurtured by them that led to such organic coverage about a client.

Thankfully, digital media provides a level-playing ground for PR agencies to be on the same plane as ad agencies. Why? Because owned media channels of clients or an influencer roped as part of a client engagement offer the platform to PR agencies to innovate with creativity just like how ad agencies innovate with creativity when their media platform is a given/taken for granted.

Classplus’s new campaign is a solid example of PR’ish creativity utilized at the right time, with the right context. And the most interesting part is that this was conceived internally, by the in-house brand team.

The background to this idea is very important.

This!

As recently as last month, Ganguly was seen hobnobbing with both the CM of his state, Mamata Banerjee, and India’s Home Minister, Amit Shah. Considering both those political figures are constantly at loggerheads, these meetings have given rise to a lot of chatter about Ganguly’s potential political moves. But the man has been stoically non-committal.

So, given this backdrop, when he dropped a cryptic message on June 1, 2022, all hell broke loose!

The timing couldn’t have been better – the third day after the end of IPL 2022.

The framing of Ganguly’s message was creatively ambiguous.

2022 marks the 30th year since the start of my journey with cricket in 1992. Since then, cricket has given me a lot. Most importantly, it has given me the support of all of you. I want to thank every single person who has been part of the journey, supported me, and helped me reach where I am today.
—a sweeping opening that makes it sound like a phase of his life has already ended.

Today, I am planning to start something that I feel will probably help a lot of people. I hope you continue your support as I enter this chapter of my life.
—this is intentionally and inventively misleading, but only in hindsight 🙂 Before the reveal, this hints at something big as his next move… enough to not reveal outright but leave people with anticipation.

So, now you understand why BCCI was besieged with questions by the end of the day and why they had to offer a clarification.

The kind of news the announcement made was entirely organic and this is the kind of impact that PR professionals and agencies crave for.

Now that the anticipation had been set, it was prudent to go for the reveal swiftly, or else, some other brand, catching a whiff of the campaign, could swoop in and take the honors away. This has happened in the past famously with Frooti – it had floated the ‘Digen Verma’ teaser with a lot of fanfare and money, only to see Times Group swooping in a day before the reveal and staking a claim to the Digen Verma character!

Sure enough, on June 2, Ganguly shared the reveal after another milder teaser that came close to the reveal.

Given that most people were anticipating a political move from Ganguly, this brand push would, no doubt, seem underwhelming. This mismatch between what was seemingly promised and what was delivered cannot be avoided. That’s the nature of a campaign that plans to utilize interest in a national-level hot topic – it is bound to be seen as the click-bait equivalent. But that’s also perhaps the aim in the first place – to get the attention of a really large number of people with the teaser, while the reveal garners the interest of a much smaller number of people. And since the latter is a factor of the former, the number of people now aware of the brand and campaign is likely to be significant.

However, I felt that the actual announcement itself was a bit of a miss.

To be fair, Ganguly really meant when he said, “I am planning to start something that I feel will probably help a lot of people”. However, what Classplus launched with the announcement is not very new – this is the same tactic used earlier by Cadbury’s/Mondelez for their ‘Not just a Cadbury’s ad’ or more recently, by Symphony Coolers. I had written about this just last month.

The idea is simply this – use artificial intelligence and digital cloning to make it look like the same celebrity is supporting/advocating/recommending/advertising a lot of shops/dealers/vendors – in Classplus’s case, individual teachers/educators in their roster (see the video below). So Ganguly produces one template video recommending an educator, and the AI does the rest – producing hundreds of versions of the same by inserting the names of many other educators.

The problem with this technique—which is getting popular in the advertising circles in India—is this: what do those educators do with that video that has Ganguly recommending them personally?

Considering Mondelez won tons of awards for their campaign, I assume most brands are now indulging in this idea mainly for the media attention and not for any tangible benefit for those who are being replaced in the template.

Like I had mentioned in my earlier post, think about what the educators could do with the video of Saurav Ganguly recommending them by name?

They could share that video via WhatsApp, to their friends, family, and peers. This would end up as a curiosity-inducing project and nothing more, though.

They could perhaps promote the video on social media channels for a fee – on Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, or Facebook. But this would require that they spend money on the promotion. If Classplus funds this media budget, that may actually be a useful element in this campaign.

Even if this video is promoted, if people have seen one video, they are unlikely to see any other video because they would think it’s all the same – it all looks the same anyway! That’s a constraint in mass-producing custom videos from a template. This tactic, made popular by Microsoft Word’s Mail Merge feature, was appropriate when the end products are sent to individuals through one-to-one methods like email. But when the end products are shared in public forums online (like social media platforms, whether posted organically or via promoted posts), they don’t exist in isolation for one person’s personal viewing/reading – they become public content. And the publicness of the content robs the personalization.

So, while Classplus is perfectly right to capitalize on the idea per se, it may help Classplus more and the actual educators less.

On the other hand, there seems to be a concerted effort by Classplus to rope in micro-influencers on LinkedIn to talk about their idea. Here’s a snapshot with identical wording that demonstrates that this is being orchestrated like an influencer campaign.

Not that there’s anything wrong with the tactic – this is a standard-issue toolkit these days when it comes to influencer campaigns. But the same logic—that of the AI-based mass-customized video—plagues these posts too. Some of them have added the #ad or #ads hashtag, but many haven’t. Beyond that, after you have seen one post, when you notice another with similar wording or framing or sentiment towards Classplus, consider what you’d think of the brand or the campaign.

For instance, if the posts are factual information, repeated posts may not jar. But when they share a sentiment like “I was shocked and pleasantly surprised” too, even if it is the standard operating procedure for so-called social media influencers campaigns these days, it would still rob the sheen of the brand’s credibility.

What Classplus did with using Ganguly’s current position/situation in the political spectrum was a masterstroke in PR creativity. After all, the brand roped him as a brand ambassador way back in 2020, and it makes sense to utilize his current situation in a smart way.

But what it was eventually utilized for—mass-custom videos—was underwhelming. It probably led to more, ‘This? Just this after that intrigue?’.

And what was even more underwhelming is Classplus trying extra hard to spread the word even as it falls short of the promise of ‘glorifying coaches and educators’. In the end, it was Ganguly producing one template and the AI doing the work of fitting as many names as people sign up through the online form. And that’s where the otherwise-sparkling premise set by the teaser loses steam.

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