Pan Bahar's Pierce Brosnan ad created lots of buzz – but was it really effective?

Few advertising campaigns have created as much media buzz in recent times as the Pan Bahar promotion.

First, of course, came the surprise of seeing actor Pierce Brosnan appear for a pan masala brand. Then came all the wisecracks (for which Twitter is an ideal medium). And now comes the shocker that the company had assured Brosnan that the product was, in fact, a “tooth whitener and mouth freshener”, and not the potentially carcinogenic pan masala that it is in reality.

Presumably neither the company, nor their ad agency realised that Brosnan’s first wife and daughter had both died of cancer, and that he himself actively works for cancer-related causes.

So, yes, the ethics of this need to be discussed.

But there is another issue that probably needs to be talked about, and that is the relevance of having a personality like Pierce Brosnan to endorse a product like Pan Bahar, and the consequent effectiveness of this campaign in doing its intended job. To the advertising and marketing community, at least, this is a matter of some professional interest.

Analysing the buzz

The fact that the Pan Bahar brand has generated so much buzz is perhaps a bit of a smokescreen. The question to ask, really, is where exactly is the buzz coming from?

Is it coming from the potential consumers of Pan Bahar? Or is it coming, instead, from some other, completely irrelevant audience?

And, speaking of which, how come there has been such a tsunami of buzz? After all, this is not the first time Pierce Brosnan has endorsed an Indian brand: he had endorsed Reid & Taylor fabrics in the prime of his career as James Bond – and while that long-running campaign was reasonably successful, there was no great media circus around it.

So it makes one wonder, just a little, about the high-decibel level of the response to Brosnan’s second coming – especially in this new, grey-bearded, rather geriatric avatar, not easily recognisable as the once-dashing 007. So is the response spontaneous, and real? Or could it be that there’s some kind of slick media management being conducted invisibly in the background to orchestrate, and tweak, the response?

An unkind question, perhaps. But a valid one, nonetheless.

Pan Bahar vs Rajnigandha

Also, one can’t help question the gratuitous use of foreign personalities and faces to advertise Indian brands (whether it’s Pan Bahar, or the multiplicity of consumer brands, from fashion products to toiletries). And one can’t help compare Pan Bahar’s slightly self-demeaning Pierce Brosnan campaign with the proudly, almost brashly, Indian campaign run by its main competitor, Rajnigandha pan masala.

Rajnigandha had struck a wonderfully real chord with Indian audiences with its TV commercial of the unabashed pan masala-chewing Indian tycoon who is shown buying up the East India Company, saying, “Do sau saal se inhon ne hamarepe raj kiya thha. Ab hamari baari hai….” And then, to clinch the deal, he offers his tin of Rajnigandha to the East India Company director who, with smiling obsequience, dutifully swallows a spoonful.

And then there was the Rajnigandha TV commercial showing another unabashed pan masala-chewing Indian tycoon buying up a luxury hotel in – was it Paris or New York? – as a $500 million birthday gift for his father, who had once worked there as a humble porter.

That Rajnigandha advertising – based on real-life global Indian icons, like Lakshmi Mittal and Sanjiv Mehta – very skillfully married a product story with a deeply felt consumer insight to create a uniquely resonant brand personality.

Pan Bahar, on the other hand, clearly had no brand strategy. It seems to have been simply a matter of “Chalo, let’s get ourselves a famous brand ambassador”, and letting the rest follow from there. It’s not an uncommon approach among un-savvy businessmen (and lazy ad agencies), who get to enjoy the added benefit of hobnobbing with the celebrity during the shooting of the film. It’s a rather expensive luxury, but then it’s something that never fails to impress one’s social circle in the re-telling.

The best thing one can say about Pan Bahar, under the circumstances, is that they managed to get a good deal out of Pierce Brosnan: despite all the chatter about how many mega-bucks Brosnan was paid for endorsing Pan Bahar, the actual figure is believed to be around $2 million. That may sound like a lot, but it translates into approximately Rs 13 crores – which is a pretty modest sum, compared with the reported going rates of some Bollywood stars.

With an angry Pierce Brosnan pulling out, the campaign, which Pan Bahar had expected to run for at least two years, is now effectively over. It will be interesting to see what they do next.

But whatever it is, they’d do well to study the Rajnigandha case carefully, first. There are some great learnings in there, on what to do, and what not to do.

The writer is Senior VP & Strategy Consultant, J. Walter Thompson. These views are strictly his own.