Is it just a bottle of water?

A couple of years back, I came across a wonderful “advertisement”. Actually I was completely blown away when I came to know that it was an ad (I thought it might be a preview of Pixar’s version of Aquaman or something ;)).

I am talking about the Epica award-winning ad for Evian bottled water where kids sing the Queen’s “We evian_water_kids.jpgwill rock you” while water characters travel across the screen, in what is actually water.
This is a real proof of the extent to which creativity can be applied. Evian, which charges two to three times a standard bottled water, convinced the people that they can feel young in body and mind by drinking Evian every day. The Evian’s “water boy” became a symbol of youth and energy, and it was soon used across different media as Evian’s youth icon. Water boy is an interesting example of the how Evian transformed itself into a “Badge of Youthfulness”.

Equally interesting is the “Naive” campaign launched by Evian in Cape Town in the summer of 2005 which added the humanitarian look to the same company. Cape Town was facing an acute shortage of water that summer. Evian decided to use advertisements to raise the awareness of the issue. The agency staff running the campaign were out on the streets of Cape Town handing out water bottles to the commuters, but instead of Evian, they were labeled “Naive” (Evian spelt backwards) with a message below it to conserve water. The bottle label also had stats and figures on how the rainfall for the year were dropped as compared to last year and gave tips on how to wisely use water. The campaign got its share of press coverage and this immediately added the tag of a brand that “cares” to Evian in Cape Town and around the World.

Evian runs a series of print advertisements from time to time, to show different characteristics of the brand. Each ad communicates a message, a message of beauty or purity, a vision or a promise which goes on to add the strength of soul and character to the brand.

Evian print ads

Evian, owned by France based Danone group, sells bottled water in more than 100 countries. Danone group is the world’s largest producer of bottled water (in terms of volume). It makes one think how do they do it? What are they actually selling? Is it just a bottle of water? No, absolutely not. They package youthfulness, energy, purity, humanity and well-being in a bottle, which also contains water!

Hello world!

I have been thinking over the past few days about how much time I spend talking to friends and family using emails and instant messaging? Well quite a lot. Normally these start with a simple point and after a few bounces across the wire, they’re like full-blown discussions. And often I noticed that I have discussed the same topic with different folks and thought that it would have been great if I can get all the comments at the same place. So I set out to look for something that could fix it up for me, is there anything out there which can make World even more reachable for me, can something called technology help…and bang came the answer – I can what they call blog it. So after months and months of “will do next weekend for sure”, here I am…ready to blog!

So what is this show blog all about? Well I can sum up the entire show blog for you in one word – “Nothing”. “Nothing”, then why am I watching reading it? Because it is on the TV Internet. Not yet Yes it is!

My Seinfeld fanaticism apart here’s what will be in there…lots of seasonal stuff, some marketing talk, tons of advertisement chitchat, little bit of finance, college football…well depends on how good we play (Go Longhorns, and yes, I bleed burnt orange), India talk and what else, technology and software (btw, I also write software for living and I’m lovin’ it!) So we can sum it all up to basically Nothing.

What will I gain? Freedom to express myself, talk to the World, have a voice and all that crap. What do I want from you? Lots of comments and chitchats.

So I will end this with one of my favorite quote: “Experience is like a comb that life gives you when you are bald.”