Powerful Taproot India campaign uses hate to promote the Mumbai Mirrors’ strength
Can the hatred a brand receives turn into its medals? Is it marketing blasphemy to burn down your product in the pack shot and have people spit at it?
Not if the haters are spawned of the evil that lurks in the dark recesses of urban morality.
This is the premise of a new Taproot India campaign for the Mumbai Mirror newspaper.
For over 10 years now, the Mumbai Mirror in India has waded deep into the swamp that stagnates in the city’s underbelly – a murky world of the most depraved souls ever known to infest human cohabitation. And it is when these evil mongers crawl out of the woodwork, angry and petrified at being exposed by a pen and a camera, that we allow ourselves a little smile.
For if these are the kinds that hate us, we will wear that hatred with pride. Because the day this seamy side of our society has no one left to hate, our city will have no love left. So to all the human traffickers, pimps, organ racketeers, sexual predators and others, bring on all your contempt. Compliments like these are what the Mumbai Mirror needs.
This year, the Mumbai Mirror has decided to tell the turbulent stories in its pages through a new voice. The voice of the evil monger – those characters in our society that are so subsumed by negativity, they can’t see life beyond that.
And like so many of them, mingling chameleon-like in the normal world, they all justify their wrong doings by playing the victim when they are exposed.
The film begins by showing apparent victims pleading for justice from what seems like blatant victimization. They seems so much like victims that one starts out feeling sorry for them being disciplined, exposed even harassed, it seems.
Until it begins to dawn that what they are justifying is the very epitome of evil itself – villains who have been exposed for who they are by stories done in the Mumbai Mirror. They are so far gone in their evil deeds that they are actually passing it of as good and necessary. So cold-blooded are they in their belief that it seems like they cannot see any wrong in what they are doing.
And when they end up hating the Mumbai Mirror with all their soul, it is with a sense of shock and relief that one realizes how much it takes to make ‘this’ side of society to hate us.
2 Comments
Nice spot that acts as double edged sword, promoting hope and pride to one audience while fostering fear and shame to the other. Well written, well cast/acted and well directed. Congrats to the client and all involved. Deserves every prize it gets.
where are the production credits? or did Taproot do this all themselves?
As a production person it really annoys me when an agency goes to the trouble of promoting their campaign and the overlook to credit the people who helped then create the work. It should be an automatic process for all agencies in Asia. If all the great US and UK agencies can do it so can Asian agencies.