Puppy love, doggie style
For years, we’ve had clients and sundry intelligence inside agencies tell us: “What we need is a Fevicol” or “What we need is a Cadbury”. And I have quietly wondered at the power of an idea of such magnitude that the brand would become a defining brief inside hundreds of briefings across the country.
God help us because there is now going to be a new wave of “What we need is a dog”. And what a dog, baby. Under the collective noses of the entire advertising fraternity, one little pug has gone from being a supporting actor in a commercial about network coverage to being the presiding star of not one, but two successive brand launches.
“Soooooooo cuuuuuuuute” (or slight phonetic variations thereof ) is the one thing (and the only thing) you hear about it. Fascinating, isn’t it, when you consider that that this four-legged thing is the source of the idiom ‘pug-ugly’? Yet, this supposed opposite of what’s supposedly considered a beautiful dog has become the face that has captured a billion hearts.
But do we realise that a fabulous case history has been written under our very noses? I know of no other case, anywhere on earth, where the animal of one commercial became the face of the brand when the company changed names, and stayed the face of the brand when the company changed hands and names in short order. Hutch and Vodafone are from two opposite ends of the earth, and as similar as chalk and cheese in the way they conceive of themselves and practice their cultures. But for you and me, all that is completely irrelevant because, as far as we are concerned, there is that delightful little dog.
A roomful of advertising’s brightest could not have come up with this. The pug may be an accident, but it is a glorious and fabulous accident, right from the very first commercial, and credit goes to whoever realised that they had stumbled upon a gold mine. No, credit does not go to whoever realised the dog was a hit three years ago (a blind man could tell you that). Credit goes to whoever realised the full possibilities of that little thing, and then brilliantly employed it to successfully pull off two brand launches in the space of three years.
In hindsight, come to think of it, the pug has worked like a punctuation mark. In the first network commercial, the pug was a colon, a “:”, he meant network. In the Hutch launch, he was a comma, a “,”, he suggested that all the wonderful feelings he caused and represented continue. In the Vodafone launch, he is also an exclamation mark, a “!”, to reassure you everything that you loved about him is right here, that he hasn’t gone anywhere.
One little pug takes all the confusion and sting out of a bewildering name change. What a godsend for a company that would otherwise have had to wrestle with ‘Hutch’ and ‘Vodafone’, names that simply don’t mean anything immediately.
And where is that sharp featured boy from the original network commercial? He was a darling, too, with that wonderfully resolute, self-absorbed air to him, the determined way he stomped across the screen, his manner suggesting a young-man-with-a-mission and the majestic confidence that the doting dog would be one step behind. He’s irrelevant now. Imagine that – he has all but vanished. But how could he? He was the human star of the film, he was supposed to be us, the consumer. For God’s sake, the pug was merely a metaphor for the network. That’s the other incredible thing: Today, the pug isn’t the network, he’s just bloody cute. The pug stands for nothing specific really at this point of time, but the power to make one billion people stop and go, “Awwwwwwwwwwww!”
And that’s the glory of his success: The pug doesn’t need to stand for anything, he just needs to show up.
Funny, isn’t it? When a leading personality endorses a brand, both brand and personality lend each other their brand appeal. When SRK (Shah Rukh Khan) does Tag Heuer, Indians who don’t know the brand understand it to be a brand of abundant energy and exacting precision. And for those of us who know Tag Heuer, SRK rises a little in our conception of him. But this dog rewrites all the rules – he was neither a known personality, nor is he a carefully invented and intended mascot, like the Air-India Maharajah, or Gattu, or the Michelin Man. He just happened to trot across one ad, and then took over the entire brand just on the strength of being so breathtakingly bizarre-faced, so tiny, so ungainly, so desperately determined to keep up with his master, his legs gamely whirring away under him.
It is a bit terrifying to think that the scale of his magnificent triumph may have begun in just a moment of inspired casting. So much for all the planning, strategies, research, insight of advertising. Speaking of modelling, you can cast just about any pug of the same breed in the next ad. (I hear that actually the pug is two of them.) No wrangling and debating with one human being. Where is the question of an exclusive contract? Who are you going to draw it up with? The entire breed?
Woe to you if you are planning on buying one of those things. Last I heard, they were about Rs 80,000 a pup, having shot up to that stratospheric price from an already unnerving Rs 40,000 a pup, thanks to the advertising. The first time I heard of what the advertising had done to the price of these pups, I remember remarking that it gave a completely new meaning to the idea of living a dog’s life.
So, the little fellow bears watching, because he is a priceless textbook being written right before our eyes. Whatever you say about him (or is it a her?), you can say only in hindsight and in appreciation, because the idea has taken on an extraordinary life and meaning of its own. Forget the fact that he appeared in an Orange commercial and became famous with Hutch. Now he launches Vodafone, and everybody loves “the Hutch pup in the Vodafone ad”. Ogilvy would have been ecstatic: It is simple, it is clear, and it will run for 30 years. Bow with wow, if I may.
(The author of this article is Alvin Saldanha, National Creative Director at Idea Domain wrote this for Agencyfaqs)
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