Where’s the Silk in this ad?

Cadbury Dairy Milk has been known for its classy, high recall advertising. So when it launched its new variant, Cadbury Dairy Milk Silk, people would no doubt have watched its two TV ads with interest.

Cadbury Dairy Milk has been known for its classy, high recall advertising. So when it launched its new variant, Cadbury Dairy Milk Silk, people would no doubt have watched its two TV ads with interest.

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There’s a shift in the Cadbury Dairy Milk (CDM) Silk advertising. Sanjay Purohit, executive director — marketing, Cadbury India, says, “Our focus so far has been on theme advertising. The theme for CDM is ‘celebrating life’. For Silk, we’ve walked the same path, except that the focus is on the product.”

So the two ads that carry the tagline, “Have you felt the Silk today?” show a man in a deserted conference room who doesn’t answer his wife’s call, so involved is he in eating his Cadbury Silk bar in the first ad. In the second, two girls waiting offstage for a Bharatanatyam performance get so engrossed in eating Cadbury Silk that they delay their entry onto the stage, holding up the performance.

Santosh Padhi, chief creative officer, Taproot India, says, “While the product love has been brought out well, the depiction is clumsy.”

KB Vinod, creative head, Mudra Mumbai, says, “It’s a neat presentation but not breakthrough, and the images are not pleasant.”

Prathap Suthan, national creative director, Cheil Worldwide, says, “The casting has an inexpensive appeal to it. Silk as a name offered enough depth to do more.”

Silk, at Rs 49 for 69 gm and Rs 99 for 160 gm, is not exactly mass. But Abhijit Avasthi, national creative director, Ogilvy India, the agency that created the ads, says, “CDM is more of a mass product so the creative is very basic in approach wherein the consumption celebrates an event. For Silk, the task was to tell people to eat chocolate.”