Indian media house ABP Group marks centenary year with a campaign conceived by Agnello Dias
Kolkata based Anandabazar Patrika Group (ABP) is one of India’s largest and oldest media houses and owns several television and online channels, and newspapers including the flagship The Telegraph. The integrated campaign was created by one of India’s best known creative directors Agnello Dias and directed by award winning film director Ashim Ahluwalia of Future East.
Globally renowned personalities like Satyajit Ray and Amartya Sen have reportedly had close association with ABP Group, having been contributors of The Telegraph at some point in their careers.
To mark their centenary this year, ABP Group has launched an audacious new campaign that seeks to capture their unspoken essence of curiosity and questioning. Using the tagline, “Curiosity Questions Answers”, the campaign underlines ABP’s tradition of seeking new truths and challenging old ones.
The 3-minute long campaign film brings to life the idea of “curiosity” through a surreal and magical fable told through the eyes of a child. Shot in the remote parts of Bengal and Jharkhand, the film is raw and real.
The print and outdoor, is bold, definitive and provocative with copy ranging from – “Answers satisfy us, questions push us” and “Questions challenge answers obey” to “A question is a legal weapon”.
Dhruba Mukherjee, CEO, ABP Group, said: “On our centenary year we wanted to articulate our brand value through a compelling idea that was as powerful as it was authentic. The thought “Curiosity Questions Answers” struck a chord with our internal and external stakeholders. We are looking forward to celebrating this important milestone by running this campaign all through the year.”
Agnello Dias, Creative Director, said: “The notion of curiosity and questioning is omnipresent in everything that APB Group has done in the last 100 years. To articulate this we didn’t want a dumbed-down simplistic catchy slogan. We felt that if we reverse the conventional cliché about curiosity providing answers to questions, it could be a fresher challenging take on the inquisitive gene that makes all of us human. It’s only apt that the line itself is a curious kind of line for a thought like this.”
Ashim Ahluwalia, Director, Future East said: “I was immediately attracted to the bold creative idea of the campaign. The film was written like a story, not an ad film. The entire journey summed up the brand without hard selling anything. In terms of creative treatment we didn’t want stage things perfectly, I wanted to find real events and spaces, real people who had never seen cameras and just improvise around them.”
The campaign will be launched all over India through TV, Cinema, print and OOH. Digital, POS for the entire 2022.
Credits
Client: ABP Group
Campaign Title: ABP Centenary Campaign
Production Company: Future East
Creative Director: Agnello Dias
Director: Ashim Ahluwalia
Art Directors: Hetal Ajmera – Sharpener Design
Copywriters: Agnello Dias, Lata Vasudevan Bagchi
