Magicbricks, an online portal for buying, selling and renting flats, owned by Times Group issued a print ad on 23 Jul’19. The ad was published in The Times of India, Mumbai edition. It featured a couple of tweets which were supposedly by their happy customers.
One ad featured Tara Sultana’s tweet, where she shared,
I was struggling to sell my property. Then I bought @magicbricks package online inclusive of a professional shoot. Got amazing results and a #perfectdeal for my property.
To investigate the authenticity of the tweet, Adgully, an online news source, decided to dig a little into it and found something surprising.
Adgully found that the people used as the face of the print ad, Tara Sultana and Ankur Suman, both had joined Twitter in July 2019. They have no followers on the platform, neither are they following anyone. Their only tweet is about them using Magicbricks, with the brand being the only one to reply. There is another ad on the brand’s social timelines with Ayush Mathur. However, he could not be traced back.
Adgully tried to reach out to Magicbricks to get a response on the issue but have not received any revert yet.
Shortly after Adgully‘s story was circulated, Magicbricks removed the creatives from all its social media handles. None of the handles and the campaign could be found. All the tweets and Facebook posts were removed, which clearly indicate that Magicbricks had acknowledged the error.
Thousands of brands, big or small, try to make their ads look as attractive as possible. In the process, some tend to use unethical measures to gain consumers trust. Though the practice should be stopped by every brand irrespective of the brand’s size, it is the least one would expect of a brand as big as Magicbricks.
