CUTTING THROUGH THE CLUTTER

Chennaibest.com speaks to Alexander Zachariah, Director, Rubecon Communications Private Limited. The winner of the Chennai Advertising Triumph's Art Director of the Year award (2001) speaks to us about what goes into making a successful campaign.

We started off in 1992; two designers and I. We were fed up with the way agencies work. We concentrated basically on design-led projects. Our initial clients were Funskool and the Taj Group. My wife, who was working as the Creative Director at HTA, joined Rubecon a couple of years ago. Now we are a 30-member organization. We refused to get accredited as an agency, deliberately stayed away from media and moved on from a creative shop to becoming a strategic creative shop. A long relationship started with Color Plus when we started doing the tags for them initially. They had a lot of faith in us. And the faith that, not only Color Plus, but also many of our initial clients had in us, has driven the growth of Rubecon to this stage. We still continue to do a lot of design work. We are into a complete range of cards, CD covers for RPG music; we are doing packaging for Food World. And we do not want to move away from designing. We want to stick to what we are good at.

The product is fantastic. I believe there is no other product that can hold a candle to Color Plus. Probably some foreign brands. They created the category. They decided on bringing a new product every other month. We consciously kept away from lifestyle kind of ads and did not use any models. The photography was devoid of any gimmicky lighting. We did not want people to look at the ad and say, “great photographs”. We simplified the communication with whacky lines. Thus we created a brand character for Color Plus.

This ad is largely catalogue-led. You have to see the product in all its glory. A 20-second or 30-second ad on Television does not do justice to the product. I mean there are a lot of people who took the ads to the showroom and asked for the particular colour that they wanted. The campaign has a lot to do with Color Plus itself. There was a lot to speak about the product. For example, “eternal youth waist down” for their wrinkle-free chinos. “It takes a lot of balls to make clothes like us” for the golf ball-wash. Like David Ogilvy says, "If there is a lot to speak about, it has to be upfront".

I think the product decides the media and good media could give you more value for your buck. It’s an extremely specialised and highly developed field. But at Rubecon we do not have a media department. We outsource media. There are some very good media houses. We want to stick to our area of specialisation, which is design.

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