It is a widely known fact that if there’s one thing which turns the viewers off in between their binge watching or doom scrolling sessions, it is usually obstructive advertisements.
Hence, what DaMESNCH did this time for their summer innerwear campaign was ‘not’ come up with an ad but a ‘retro-themed’ music content video featuring Vicky Kaushal, coincidentally with his viral yet peppy number- Tauba Tauba.
Speaking to Marketing Mind exclusively on the making of DaMENSCH’s ‘It’s a New Feeling’ content film, Bodhisatwa Dasgupta, Founder, The Voice Company, mentioned that this film was a part of his agency’s one-year retainer association with the innerwear brand wherein he helped the brand’s internal creative team as a Creative Director.
“When me and Anurag (Founder of DaMENSCH) were discussing the brand’s overarching problems that we needed to solve in a stipulated timeline, we read out some of the customer testimonials that we’d received and what we noticed was that people didn’t really have adjectives to describe the feeling that they had upon wearing DaMENSCH’s innerwear. So, the insight for ‘It’s A New Feeling’ came from those testimonials themselves,” he shared.
Picking from here, he also mentioned that the reason behind opting to come up with a gibberish-musical rendition of what seems to be an RD Burman Song- Duniya Mein Logo Ko, was rooted in the observation that today is the time when there has been a coming back of old musical tracks in modern remixes on shows.
“If you see OTT shows today, you’ll see that a lot of their music has been taken from the old music numbers from the 60s, 70s, 80s and so on and so forth. And that’s interesting because fashion and music are usually the two industries which by nature are very cyclic, for example white collared shirts which were iconic in the 60s are all coming back right now and the same is happening with music as well as it is also coming back full circle,” he said.
Hence, based on this insight, it was decided that the musical content film will be recreated keeping in mind the musical instruments and tune from one of the old tracks with the lyrics being all gibberish so that the viewers get hooked in the first few seconds itself as the music seems familiar to them but the lyrics, being as gibberish as they are keep them glued to the screen till the end, he quipped.
Upon being questioned as to what made Vicky Kaushal click for the particular content piece, Dasgupta shared that it was mainly because the celeb already had a well known connection with music videos for he himself loves Punjabi music and keeps grooving on to them and the same coupled with the fact that Kaushal’s personality isn’t the exact ‘traditional alpha male’ but a very holistic one.
“If you look at Vicky, he also grooves onto a lot of musical videos himself without any branded association, so there’s a general tendency that people will assume that the content piece is one of his usual dance videos. Also, because he is a mix of all things funny, witty, sexy, sensitive and cuteness amongst others, he indeed covers the length and breadth of his movements quite aptly,” he added.
Interestingly, he also pointed out that since Kaushal really got excited by the atypical idea and script of the film, he was quick to get on board and be a part of the same’s execution.
Highlighting as to how the innerwear category has focussed on bravado and machoism since time immemorial, The Voice Company’s Dasgupta stated that what DaMENSCH really wanted to do with this film was have a fresh and relatable perspective owing to its challenger positioning.
“The advertising of innerwear ads since the beginning of time has been mainly about a macho man wearing some brief and rescuing some woman from some atrocity like fire, fight and what not. To me, that advertising is nothing but shit. And like me, Vicky himself didn’t want to do stuff like that but try new things. So when he saw this film, he saw that this was a nice, fun film for an underwear brand and he got sold onto it almost instantly,” he mentioned.
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Delving further into the gibberish quotient of the musical content film, he stated that because DaMENSCH is a D2C brand, he wanted to ensure that the brand can own the track instead of using one as a one-time thing and pay royalties for multiple usages as that is nothing but wastage of ad monies in his viewpoint.
“Come to think of it, if the brand can own a track instead of buying a soundtrack, the monies which would be spent on getting the latter could be put into a different aspect of marketing and therefore would yield so much more results and lead to far better ROI. Also, music videos generally are a part of two-way communication rather than a one-way one, so that also worked in our favour in addition to the happy coincidence of Vicky’s Tauba Tauba song getting released just a day before the content film’s launch,” he said.
Commenting on how ‘It’s A New Feeling’ strikes the chord with DaMENSCH’s target audience, he mentioned that since the brand targets both GenZ and Millennials, the usage of the renditioned song enabled the brand to hit the bulls eye with the two sects since Millennials already would know the song and GenZs growing up have also imprinted in their head the musical tastes of their parents and elders, so even though they wouldn’t recognise the exact song, they’ll still know the music somewhere deep down.
“When we were doing the soundtrack, we wanted to keep it such that it bridges the gap of both Millennials and GenZs from an identification pov and we did so by using elements which the older generation would know at once and at the same time the younger lot would also find pleasing and enjoyable because GenZs don’t discriminate and listen to anything that sounds nice,” he said.
Throwing light onto the objective which the brand aims to achieve from the particular content piece, Dasgupta stated that the film has been made keeping in mind that it builds top of mind recall and stickiness and the other was driving sales, for which the brand is already running performance marketing campaign on social media and CTV for an edited 20-seconder of the original 27-seconder film.
On a concluding note, Dasgupta said, “The thing with ads is that its obstructing what audiences want to do with their lives, but if you look at content, it is not that and it doesn’t show up on your screen and says buy me. So the whole idea behind this film was to design a piece of content and not an ad. It feels very organic and just another new release of Kaushal’s soundtrack and it is only at the end that one realizes that this is actually an ad. This film is selling something, but in a nice way and not like a product window as the underwear comes in very beautifully in the music video.”
