Nawabs, Nudes, Noodles: India through 50 Years of Advertising

by Ambi Parameswaran

The growth of mobile phones in rural India has opened up a great new medium, as proven by the Hindustan Unilever’s ‘Kan Khajura Tesan’ campaign. This campaign created a new way of engaging with rural consumers; they were asked to make a missed call to a number to receive some free entertainment call on their phones. The free entertainment could be jokes, songs or anything else. The entertainment module also included a few ads for HUL brands. This campaign, running in primarily media-dark north Indian markets, is reported to have generated over 12 million users with over 50,000 missed calls a day. Conceptualized and executed by the creative agency Lowe Lintas and the media agency Omnicom’s PHD, this is a breakthrough in rural market communication, where a marketer, by roping in a mobile partner, managed to create a new medium to deliver their sales message. The missed call/call back mode was also used very successfully by political parties during the 2014 parliamentary elections. The rural consumer is changing and the evidence of that