Search the Site

FREAK Shots: Call-and-Response Advertising

From our friend Mayur Misra in India comes an interesting photograph:

Photo: Mayur Misra


As Mayur explains:

I don’t know if you have seen this one but the ad in the attachment is from 2007 of the ad wars between Jet Airways, Kingfisher Airlines and Go Airways in India. The background of the story is this: Jet Airways had changed the colors of its planes and the uniform and its airplanes then. Kingfisher Airlines is its biggest competitor and put the other ad 1-2 days later above the Jet ad. Now here is the smartest one, Go Air put the ad above both the airlines ads. See the series of ads in that context, it’s very funny.

This is not the first time we’ve seen such call-and-response advertising from India. I am guessing this practice exists in the U.S., especially on the local-advertising front, but it is probably rarer.
In an upcoming podcast, we tell the story of an advertising campaign whose message was blunted when the celebrity who appears in the ads was forced to advertise for a rival company (as he is the member of a professional sports team that made a deal with the rival). Remember Michael Jordan and the famous Nike/Reebok Olympic conflict?


Comments