Recap2019: Brands with a challenger attitude stood out, says Garima Khandelwal

Mullen Lintas' Chief Creative Officer, Garima Khandelwal is a creative veteran with International advertising exposure. In this recap, she charts out the year 2019 from a creative lens and shares her observations on the common themes and trends that stood out in her favourite campaigns for the year.

Which were your favourite top 5 campaigns of 2019? (Can be local or global)

I have picked global campaigns for this list. What’s common in all is that each has a challenger attitude.

Burger King’s Burn that ad

Hotel Honduras Maya, HotelBnB

Black and Abroad, Go Back to Africa

Skittles, The Musical

No Need to Fly – Around the World in Germany

Did any creative trend or strategy catch your attention? What was it and how was it different?

Brands are going hyper local as a strategic intent, reflecting the same in their creative communication. We recently executed a relaunch campaign for Tata Tea Premium by creating specific ads for each state. A brand that could have gone macro with a national campaign with one ad, dubbed in many languages, has gone micro, with different ads, a specific campaign for every state. It shows that going forward, there is a need to custom make, to speak specifically and especially to the audiences, as opposed to one brand campaign that speaks to all. We have to target the audience, and not think of “a” target audience. There is a campaign this year for Puppo, that sells personalized nutrition for your dog. They have used algorithms and data inputs for a campaign that has 100,729 ads for each of the 100,729 dogs in NYC.

What do you think would be the creative trends for the 2020?

Like 20 seconders was one trend, I think 2 years ago, solving for costly airtime. Attaching various days of the year to your product story to create digital content was another, solving to create brand love, as opposed to being present transactionally in the consumer’s headspace. I find another trend is to think of a very specific solution for a specific brand, an actual product or an execution idea. This year’s Purina’s Street Vet is one such example, it took 2 years for a specific technical solution. Caravan is another brilliant example. You are the specialist of that idea then, gives you the ipr on it. Hope we see more and more of this trend. It gives power back to the idea. 

And finally, what one thing would you want within the Creative fraternity to change to yield better work and results?

Not exactly change, but rather go back to being irreverent. There is a lot of sanity and correctness everywhere around now. Most of the ideas we celebrate are also solving global problems, but there was a time we celebrated beer and milk commercials too. I miss the humour.

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