JioMart, the Reliance-backed online grocery delivery turned e-commerce company, has made a late but wealthy entry into the already crowded Indian e-commerce market. With the Indian Premier League and the country’s love for rishtedaari as leverage, JioMart is carving out a space for itself. The company has released four ads, two 25-seconders and two 20-seconds, highlighting the warm relationships that people build with shopkeepers over the years and how one can experience the same when shopping on JioMart.
Kartik Smetacek, joint national creative director of L&K Saatchi & Saatchi, the Publicis-owned agency behind the four ads, explains that JioMart is a homegrown challenger taking on international e-commerce giants. He states that the agency’s brief was to carve a distinctive space for the brand within the category with a mission to bring in the next billion customers into the world of e-commerce.
Smetacek acknowledges that the short duration of the ads during the T20 league is a topic most advertising agency folks share a love-hate relationship with every year. He credits his creative team led by Trishay Kotwal for the sharpness of the scripts and Chrome Pictures’ director Hemant Bhandari “who was like a surgeon and managed to tell the stories beautifully in 25 seconds for two ads and 20 seconds for the other two.”
The biggest challenge, says the NCD, was about the precision of the script. Two of the four ads were shot in Mumbai and the rest in Delhi over three days, and they were edited on the fly, making the process quick.
Smetacek also talks about the use of celebrities in advertising and how they sometimes become the clutter. He says that the use of cricketers in ads these days is overdone, and what differentiates advertising more than anything is the idea. JioMart did not discuss celebrities with the client and delivered something human, insightful, and softer which stands apart by being different from the typical IPL ads.
