JOIN USBang on the brand with creative ads
A digital film of Truecaller went live on social media on August 19. The film features actor Nawazuddin Siddiqui communicating the need to know your caller.
Though, at times, Truecaller faces a lot of flak for providing inaccurate information about a caller, but something like this can prevent one from the situation of picking a wrong or a right call.
This has somehow found a resonance in the market and Siddiqui as the protagonist has struck a chord among the audience by sharing his personal experience. In a conversational style he is sharing stories of his ‘struggling’ days and admitting how a phone call changed his life.
Siddiqui is telling the story of his life and how he would miss many calls from unknown numbers and didn’t have a way to know who was calling him. It just happened by chance that he got a call one fine day from an unknown number, he answered it and realised it was for a film role.
He terms himself lucky to have received that call but he asks the viewers why do they want to take a change? “Kismet ne bacha liya yaar, par aapke kismet ki ghanti mahino tak bajti rahegi, iski koi guarantee hai kya?” – the honesty of the line has done the trick for the brand as the ad is viral on social media.
These sights of advertisements where the creative heads are incorporating personal stories to sell their product through personal experience of a celebrity are slowly finding space in the advertising world.
Earlier actress-model Lisa Ray, cancer survivor, shared her personal story in HDFC Life Cancer Care and Irrfan Khan educated the viewers by showing how they can save electricity in simple steps. These non-glamourised advertisements are projecting real-life stories and events using subtle subtexts.
“More than 80 million of us in India, already use Truecaller. So our task isn’t to address people who already have it downloaded on their phones. It is to inform the rest of India which is unaware the app. That’s where Nawazuddin came in. Nawaz is the voice of the emerging India. And the true story of where he has emerged from, the story of a guy who made the most of what life and luck threw up, is compelling. We saw an effortless link between the task and Nawaz’s story. Thereafter the only thing to do was to have him tell us his story in his words and observe the same. The product just slips in effortlessly,” said Ashish Chakravarty, Truecaller’s national creative director, Contract India.