If there are movie stars in every third television commercial, here is who you should blame

From the ’50s to the ’80s, if at all a male star featured in an advertisement, it was an exception. Dilip Kumar rarely featured in an ad – the pickle ad was an exception that proved the rule – neither did Raj Kapoor nor Dev Anand. In the south, NT Rama Rao, Shivaji Ganesan, MG Ramachandran, Raj Kumar or Prem Nazir never did advertisements. I suppose they felt that their fans would see them as pure ‘commercial artists’ if they did endorsements for money.

All this was set to change in 1995. Amitabh Bachchan was the ruling deity in Bollywood. Brand BPL was facing competition from international majors such as Sony, Toshiba as well as Indian players such as Videocon and Onida. In a coup of sorts, the brand roped in the Big B to endorse it. Amitabh had taken a break from films and was involved in building his company ABCL. The brand used him in a series of ads where he never openly endorsed the brand, but did speak of his passion for excellence and how one brand reflected this passion. In one of the ads, he named the various favourite characters he had played in his movies and how behind all of them was the passion for doing the best. The campaign went on to win accolades from both critics and consumers.

Interestingly, in mid-2015, Pothy’s, a Tamil Nadu-based large garment retailer roped in Kamal Haasan for the first time to do an ad for them; the message was about ‘trust’, echoing what Big B did for BPL. Unfortunately, BPL did not sustain its brand-building efforts and virtually vanished in the 2000s in the face of fresh attack from the Korean majors such as Samsung and LG.

If we do a flash forward to the 2000s, you cannot watch three ads without spotting a celebrity. Big film stars like Amitabh Bachchan, SRK, Aamir Khan, Ranbir Kapoor and Salman Khan have been used to sell colas, biscuits, hair oil, shampoos, creams, suitings, shoes, cars, motorbikes, mobile services, mobile handsets, undergarments – yes, SRK endorses Lux Cozi.

Female stars too are no spring chickens in the endorsement game. When the FCB Ulka team was looking for a female star to endorse a hair oil brand they could not find one among the top ten heroines who was free to do the endorsement. Stars like Katrina Kaif, Kareena Kapoor and Aishwarya Rai have a long list of endorsements. Even stars who entered the fray in the 2010s, such as Sonakshi Sinha, today have endorsements that run in to pages.

The South is now starting to resemble the North. The biggest star of the south, Rajnikanth, continues to dodge the brand bullets, but all the others are ready to play the game. Tamil stars like Vijay, Surya and Telugu superstar Mahesh Babu are today seen endorsing a variety of brands from two wheelers to tractors, biscuits to banyans, mobile services and more.

Why this celebrity obsession, you may ask.

Professor Arvind Rajagopal of New York University has been studying the changing Indian media scene, advertising and consumer perceptions. He points out that brands started using totems from the bazaar to connect with consumers. In the 1950s, it was common to see brands like Pears using images of gods to sell themselves. Burmah Shell, a multinational petroleum company used to distribute calendars featuring Hindu gods and goddesses. Professor Rajagopal says that brands borrowed from bazaar art to connect with the consumers when selling products the consumer was not familiar with.

It is likely this is happening at a larger scale in the 2010s. Brands are trying to drive usage down the socio-economic pyramid. Products like face wash and skin creams are now being targeted at the lower-middle classes. Shampoos and two-wheelers are also aiming to go down the pyramid. Mobile services too are targeting the lower classes. In all these cases, using a celebrity makes the message a lot more appealing and credible to the uninitiated.

As a case in point, when Cadbury had to face negative reports about worm infestation – which happened in the shops, not in their factories – it used the power of Amitabh Bachchan to send out the message that their packages have been revamped to take care of any such problem.

The second reason is that compared to the cost of running a campaign on mass media, the cost of a celebrity is today a lot more approachable. Many large brands look at a media spend in the region of Rs 100 crores. In this context, paying SRK or Big B an amount equal to Rs 10 crores does not seem too high, especially if their face will help the brand gain a few market-share points.

The nature of using film stars is also changing. Most brands have figured out that just saying ‘I use Lux’ is no longer going to work, if all brands are using film stars. Savvy ad agencies have figured out that you need to ‘cast’ the film star as a character in a film rather than as a ‘star’. In the ad film for TVS Scooty, Priety Zinta was used as just a girl having fun on her scooter.

One final reason film stars are becoming the staple in Indian ads is the fact that many marketers are resorting to pre-testing the ads. While pre-testing an ad, using a celebrity often helps the brand score many extra points. So for an additional cost of around 5 to 10 per cent of the annual media budget, if you can get a good score in the pre-test, the marketing manager is not going to let that go. Thus, the film industry, film stars and brands have come together to make a nice threesome to sing the ‘buy me’ song to the enchanted moviegoer.

Excerpted with permission from Nawabs, Nudes, Noodles: India Through 50 Years Of Advertising, Ambi Parameswaran, Pan Macmillan.