Valentine's Day inspires brands to pour love into their ads

Brands know that whether it's for couples or even singletons, there is no avoiding the Valentine's Day onslaught. So, they maximise on the 'love is in the air' trend to roll out some endearing and touchy ad campaigns. This year, it's interesting to see how brands are moving over from mushy to modern-day mushy and are attempting to facilitate real-world connections. The campaigns by Cadbury Dairy Milk Silk, Swiggy, MTV among others, take the idea of modern-day marketing a step ahead.

Cadbury Dairy Milk Silk

Cadbury Dairy Milk Silk, recently announced the launch of its new special edition pack with a heart pop. The brand has rolled out a new thematic TVC, where the new Heart Pop bar is the hero. The film is about two friends-a boy and a girl at their college hangout. The boy has a bar of the New Cadbury Dairy Milk Silk Heart Pop with him in his bag, but is hesitating to pop the question with it. Every time he goes to pick up the bar from the bag, the girl looks in his direction and he loses the courage. Eventually the girl notices the bar in his bag while he's looking away. She picks it up and decides to take the lead. She now proposes to the boy by popping the heart out. To her surprise the boy gives an 'oh my god' expression which one usually expects from the girl when proposed.

The TVC is supported by a 360-degree marketing campaign that includes multiple TV associations, digital, outdoor activations, exciting in-store activations and samplings. In addition to this, Mondelez India has gone a step ahead to develop a unique gifting innovation this year, which probably is one-of-its-kind in the industry. The brand has also been creating new shopping opportunities through personalization and gifting platforms. This year, the company has also designed a gifting innovation using Augmented Reality (AR) to create a unique gifting experience. It has introduced a 'Cadbury Joy Deliveries AR (Augmented Reality) enabled Gift Box' and will roll-out a limited-edition pack exclusively on ecommerce sites. The AR enabled gift box comes with two large Silk Limited Edition Valentine Chocolate bars (250 g each.) Once a person orders a box to be sent over to someone else, the latter can experience the box come alive with animation and virtual personalized messaging, which will be powered by a Blippar App.

Swiggy

Matchmaking in the modern-day is all about choosing a partner (by face) and hoping it 'clicks.' This Valentine's Day, among all the roses and right-swipes, Swiggy and their digital agency partner, Dentsu Webchutney, have come up with a novel approach to finding the perfect match. It is with this intent that Swiggy created My ValenDine, an opt-in platform, which uses interested Swiggy users' order history and matches them based on their favourite food and preferences. On Valentine's Day, users come back to the microsite to find who their Valendine matches are.

The campaign was launched on Sunday February 11, on myvalendine.swiggy.com, where registrations were open until Monday night. Interested users had to register before the deadline with their name, phone number and a link to their Facebook profile. The site hit immediate success on Sunday, with close to 1000 registrations within the first few hours, despite limited promotion.

MTV

This Valentine's Day, viewers can sit back, relax, fill their popcorn tubs and enjoy a movie marathon by budding talents 8.00 pm onwards on MTV. HP and MTV came together to create a beautiful collaborative platform 'Fame-istan,' that would provide young millennials with a lifetime opportunity to showcase their talent and be mentored by Bollywood's best. The fact that all these films got created and edited on HP Laptops is a testimony to the technological prowess and power of the HP machines. HP MTV Fame-istan will feature three movies made by aspiring filmmakers of the country and mentored by talent powerhouses of the Indian film industry like Mohit Suri, Radhika Apte and Homi Adajania.

Kellogg's India

Kellogg's launched a campaign this February for its recently launched Kellogg's Chocos Fills - a crunchy snack with a delicious chocolate filling. The campaign kicked off with Tanmay Bhatt falling prey to the Chocorobbers histrionics, with them robbing him of his chocolaty treats. While he sulked, he called out to the fans to be wary of the Chocorobbers. But this was just the beginning. The Chocorobbers devised and showcased clever ways to devour chocolaty treats from Rose Day onwards through Propose Day, Promise Day and the rest of the Valentine's week. While they were at it, they even got to Kaneez Surka's chocolaty treats who vented her frustration on them with her unique "Slam Poetry." With so many chocolaty treats going missing, Ashish Shakya too joined the bandwagon only to discover in the end that even he had fallen prey to the Chocorobbers' antiques.

BankBazaar

This year, the brand plays cupid by bringing a long-distance couple together. Shortlisted through a contest asking couples to share their love story, the couple with the most heart-warming story was chosen to participate in the campaign. With 1,955 kms of separation between a boy living in Pune and a girl living in Kolkata, BankBazaar hopes to share their story 1,955 times on Facebook and fly one of them down to spend this day of love with their loved one.

Tanishq

As a brand that celebrates relationships, Tanishq has over the years always presented a very mature and progressive point of view on the subject of love. For Valentines, the film conceptualised by Arun Iyer, Chairman and CCO - Lowe Lintas and directed by Gauri Shinde, helps to give Valentine's Day a whole new meaning. The film brings on camera, real people who had a relationship in the past to talk about their belief in love. A series of candid conversations made by corporate executives, artists, actors like Sandhya Mridul and Manav Kaul, remembers their relationships and cherishes what remains; love. The film leaves the viewers with a touching message to 'keep celebrating love.'

ONLY 

ONLY India has released a new campaign for Valentine's Day. Created by WATConsult, the digital and social media agency from Dentsu Aegis Network India, the campaign does not take the usual route. Instead, sketching a little outside the lines, ONLY presents an anti-Valentine's campaign that resonates with its TG, the 16-24 age group. It is bold and dares to think differently about Valentine's Day. Keeping the brand philosophy, WATConsult has rolled out a content series that appeals to the things one really loves. Based on the concept, 'it understands you, sometimes a whole lot better than your partner,' the series revolves around the things that millennials really care about like shopping, pizza and chocolate among others. The campaign also highlights interesting 'Valentine's Day' offers by ONLY across its social media channels.

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