Category: NEWS

By A Correspondent

DS Group launched a new campaign for its confectionary brand Pass Pass, the branded mouth freshener. Pass Pass leverages the opportunity of bringing people and relationships closer once again. And that became the centrepiece of its positioning: Human bonding and Closeness. It’s new. But it’s also timeless.

The new campaign, with TV playing the pivotal role, creates imagery stemming from the positioning of closeness. The brand creates a world that enables these many moments in many different ways for all kinds of people, using different touch points in the ecosystem: social media, radio, real-world experiential engagement, and point of sale activities.

The TVC drives home the point, through collection of visual montages shot in scenic locations, that closeness isn’t limited by age and shows both young as well as old people sharing moments of closeness.

The film opens with a young woman opening the window of a car and letting the sunshine in. Next we see a young woman walking away after having opened a door. Then we are shown a man and a woman whose hands touch as they are passing by and the woman turns around and walks away smiling. After this, we see a man coming up and greeting a young lady who is holding a Pass Pass family pack seated with her friends who is very happy to see him and beams widely. We cut to a middle-aged man picking up his woman, almost suddenly, in an open field. We then see a bunch of young men and women holding hands on a terrace and grooving to music, as one of them passes on a sachet of Pass Pass.

We see more people coming together and connecting like a young man teaches a much older woman how to ride a scooter, youngsters bonding over a bonfire and a guitar tune. The film ends with people from all age groups coming together and sharing moments over a dinner on a terrace lit by lamps.

The film has a duet of a male voice over with an interlude of a female singer. The male voice over beckons us to ‘khidikiyan kholdo, darwaazon ko khula chodh do, haathon ki phire se haathon mein daalo, kisi ko gudh gudao, kisi ko gaud uthao, dosti karo, mohabbat karo, gale milo, aankh milao, kisi ko phir apna banao, taaya taayi mausa mausi sab se pyaar karo, raho hamesha pass pass’. In between this warm friendly voice over, the female singer takes off with the lyrics ‘pass pass aao, mahaul mehkao’.

“The film celebrates human bonding. You don’t have to be young to enjoy moments that you are spending together. The world seems to be drifting apart with technology pulling people into lives that are largely individual. Today people are caught with themselves, their own lives, more than ever before. Increasingly, people are spending time with gadgets like laptops, cellphones and their work lives. Facebook, Twitter, Whatsapp etc do bring people together but limits physical interaction. You can’t shake hands with a laptop or tickle a cellphone can you?” said Titus Upputuru, NCD, Dentsu Marcom.

The campaign has a lyrical quality to it. “We have had jingle based films and we have had films led by voice over. Seldom do we have them coming together in the same communication. We have had this combination in films like Silsila where Amitabh Bachchan’s deep voice over is interspersed with Lata Mangeshkar’s Ye kahan se aagaye hum. The Pass Pass film attempts to recreate the magic of voice over and song to leave the viewers wanting more,” he said.

Rajeev Jain, Sr General Manager, Marketing, DS Group said, “Pass Pass has built its equity from its ubiquity and has established itself as a brand that inspires togetherness and stands for ‘Human bonding and Closeness’. The campaign also focuses on the message that Pass Pass has become a part of the lives of many Indians’ as their favourite branded after mint and it encourages people to come together, no matter what the age is. It also says that family is the new friend. Generation gap is now a gap too thin and is a myth in today’s world.”

Each element of the campaign invokes people to come together and get close to each other. The print and POS shows people coming together with evocative lines like ‘Haathon ka tanha tehelne na do’.

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