InspiRAYtion 28 - A breath of fresh air

By Rayomand J Patell

Hello again. I was away for a few weeks, apologies. Had taken off to a friend’s bungalow to sit by the sea and detox from it all.

Picking up straight from where InspiRAYtion 27 left off, this morning I saw a fresh campaign for Shaadi dot com.

The first poster hit beautifully, followed by the second and then they just kept coming.

In a few moments, I was in splits. Great writing has that effect on me.

One of the things I like to do and I urge you to do too is to celebrate work if you like it. In a flash, I’d posted it upon both my ‘gram and even LinkedIn.

A few hours later, it turned out to be young Toto’s work, one of my ex Creative Leaders. As all good leaders do, he shared full credit with his own internal team at Shaadi as well as Cultr the agency that worked upon it with them.

There are more than a few reasons I loved it.

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In an ocean of endless AI blah blah tech platform blah blah, this campaign took the single highest insightful truth about the single life and intersected it with the gym life. AI is simply never going to be able to think or write like this. Not now not with Agentic not with the Singularity not with any Tech Bros wet dream of Cyborg Consciousness. You can’t touch this, stay in your linear lane, lateral thinking will always run rings around LLM output.

And when they wrote, it was with a level of desi snark I haven’t read since the early days of Channel V. What a fantastic and surprising tone of voice for the brand.

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Good work can make you late for work. Great work can make you quit. In this case, I was laughing, reading it, sharing it, posting it, and feeling so good with the warmth of its sheer chutzpah. The very humanity of it all.

In the last month, while I was away there has been much navel-gazing about the entries at Cannes this year being collectively selective with the truth. Now enough rivers of ink have flowed for me to get started but there was all that heavy duty washing of dirty linen in public on one hand and on the other, this beautiful little campaign that just leaped off the page at me and charmed its way into my heart. It did that most beautiful thing of all, inspired me.

Great writing and art direction remain my first love; no matter how many years I spend having to run people and places, it’s always been about the work for me.

Will it win? In my humble opinion it has already won just by being this refreshing and charming (and also very very funny). Should it show up at an award show I should be very happy to see it do well. Will it win at Cannes? Who cares, it’s simultaneously way bigger in honesty than some doctored entry and way simpler than some needlessly contrived and complicated piece that involves the blood of wolverines being used as ink for ads to protect their rights. Just kidding to make the point.

If you’re a young Cub, please look at these posters and consider how just five good ones can reinvent a legacy brand, literally overnight. If you’re doing spec ads please look at a distinct tone of voice to get your work rising above the rest of that ocean of word play and vanilla 101 stuff. This is how it’s done and let me tell you, it looks deceptively simple, it isn’t in the least.

Bravo Shaadi dot com. Do stay wedded to this level of Creativity.

On that happy note, see you next Thursday!

Rayomand J Patell is an advertising veteran and InspiRAYtion is a weekly column on everything about advertising and marketing.

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