'Not an Idea Sirji', just cliche after cliche

Idea Cellular seems to be running out of ideas when it comes to its ad campaigns. The latest campaign goes across the same cliche idea of empowering villages through the use of internet and a youngster finding an answer to this.

The new ad film called 'Transform India' has a girl returning to her village and learning the situation is bad due to the young moving to cities to work, leaving behind the elderly.

We know that Idea like all other telecom companies has been looking to target the rural market by trying to appeal to them, but it seems like there is very little thought or efforts put into their ad campaigns recently. The ad is conceptualised by Lowe Lintas, the same agency which has worked on the brand for years and created the iconic 'What an Idea Sirji!' campaign with Abhishek Bachchan or the 'No Ullu Banoing' campaign.

Gone is the humor and the clever wit with which the brand was synonymous for using in its ad campaign earlier. It all particularly started to go down for the brand's ad campaigns when it launched the 'IIN or Idea Internet Network' ad campaign.

You would think that Idea would have learnt from this when it got trolled on social networking sites for the IIN campaign, but they continued with 'Go Go Go Go Get Idea' campaign, which was even worse. Not even the recent campaign '4G Biggest Small Change' was anywhere close to the creativity of its older ad campaigns. Even the 'My Idea' app tried to bring back humor, but sadly failed.

The only TV film which seemed right on the spot in terms of humor and emotion was the recent 'Intenet4All' TV film. The brand or agency had definitely used everyday insight of people very well to craft the ad.

Whether it is the brand or the ad agency to blame for the lackluster ads Idea has come up with in the recent past is something which only they themselves will know.