HDFC Bank CMO Ravi Santhanam on cracking the IPL ad game
Ravi Santhanam, Group Head and CMO of HDFC Bank, on the IPL advertiser's advantage and the bank's ad strategy this season.
The Indian Premier League (IPL) over the years has stood as a testament to India's most loved and worshipped sport, cricket. However, the IPL is no longer just a cricket tournament but also a marketing festival that sees brands across categories vying for a piece of action on and off the pitch.
One such brand that is highly visible in the IPL 2024 arena is HDFC Bank which is using the IPL platform to boost awareness for PayZapp, an all-in-one online payment application. In an exclusive conversation with Storyboard18's editor Delshad Irani, Ravi Santhanam, Group Head and CMO of HDFC Bank, spoke about the IPL as an advertiser's platform, the insights driving the PayZapp campaign and what makes the IPL unique from a marketer's vantage.
Edited excerpts.
As a sports fan and a marketer, how excited are you for IPL 2024?
This is the biggest sporting live tournament that's going to happen anywhere in the subcontinent. For all sports fans, this is the Mecca, this is the Diwali of sports. As a marketer, you are getting a huge audience glued to a certain property for a long period. It's not a one-day event. It's almost a 60-day event, wherein you will get an opportunity to speak to an audience for 60 days, continuously, on a platform that they are extremely passionate about. And as they are viewing, it moves on from a connected TV to a linear television to digital, the ability to target for a marketer becomes extremely exponential. That combination is what keeps us very excited.
The IPL is one of those few times in the year when people almost look forward to seeing advertising. What do you have lined up for this season?
This season is all about the introduction of our new product, the payment platform PayZapp. We took this leap into the digital world six months back with the launch of our HDFC Bank Now digital properties. We started off with Expressway, which is a one-stop destination for our customers to access anything from the bank in terms of retail assets and services. The next one is what we have now launched into the market, which is PayZapp, an all-encompassing payment app that anyone in the country can use. We thought this is the best opportunity for us to introduce PayZapp to a wide audience at this point.
What is the crux of your advertising and marketing strategy for PayZapp and what was the brief to the agency?
The first thing was, what is the product all about, and what is the product truth all about? And we were very clear that for us, the product truth is about giving choices to consumers when it comes to payment. With PayZapp, you can use any form of payment, whether it is UPI, debit card, or credit card. You can use tap and pay, swipe and pay, which we have introduced. You can pay anyone, anywhere. And, finally, to put it all in a nutshell, it's all about choices.
So when we had very clearly articulated that our product narrative is all about choices, then the brief to the agency was how do you bring this choice alive for our consumers? What is the human insight that you can break and make it clutter-free? Because at the end of the day, it all depends on the powerful human insight that we can bring out.
What happened when we were debating around this is, not every one of us has got choices in everything we do. There are many of us, for sheer circumstantial reasons, who end up having no choices in many things that we do in our life. But at least when it comes to payment, all those people have multiple choices with PayZapp. We said this narrative can work. That's how we started with the brief of using the product truth and from there, the creative idea flowed.
You brought on board Tiger Shroff, Kapil Sharma and Prabhu Deva. It's an interesting mix of celebrities you have here. What was driving these choices?
It was about choices. Then how should we creatively tell this story to our consumers? So again, lots and lots of ideas were thrown around, and then we decided that this human insight is something that we can take forward. Now, how do you come out with a story that brings this human insight? So we wanted to go and look at celebrities who are being very stereotyped in their professions. Cricket and Bollywood are the biggest in terms of the most followed celebrities in the country. We found in Bollywood, many people are stereotyped to do specific roles in their professional lives.
So we had a long list of celebrities, and then we were trying to figure out which is the one that is currently in line with our target audience set of who we are looking at, and looking at the entire scope of the country in terms of South, North, East, West. We identified many people, and finally, we zeroed in on all three of them.
For this campaign, we had to write the script after we chose the artist. Normally, you write a script, and then you choose an artist in terms of who is going to be the protagonist to play the role. Now here, we have to find out who is going to be the protagonist, and then write the script in line with that choice.
The creative treatment came again from the fact that they have to act like themselves and people are expecting them to always be like this, whereas they also want to explore many things in life.
It was fantastic shooting with all three of them and the kind of collaboration we had in terms of their ability to bring the story alive. It was phenomenal.
It was amazing to see Prabhu Deva do dance steps he did 25 years back, and still remember and do it exactly like that. It was the kind of moment where you see the celebrities bring alive their own life very, very naturally.
What do you make of the IPL as an advertising platform?
The format lends itself very well because it is very quick-moving, and the breaks in which you get the ads today are maybe 40 seconds to a minute. In addition to that break, you also get multiple properties, whether it is the fall of wickets, whether it is the strategic timeout, where you can actually integrate the brand in multiple ways.
People's way of watching sports has changed. It is digital, connected TV and linear TV, people watch across all three devices. It is interactive and becoming an increasingly immersive experience. What is a passive viewing of a television screen, with this kind of all three elements coming together, has become a very immersive and interactive experience. In addition to that people play fantasy sports. So there is a lot of surround activity happening and this surround is what is enabling all of us to get hooked.
