Well planned?

India has grown several folds across various verticals, yet health insurance has not made it to the necessity list of the common man. Over years, the changing lifestyle and alarming pollution rates have only increased the risk of various life-threatening diseases such as cancer, making the necessity to opt for a health insurance a wise life choice.

Many insurance companies are doing their bit in educating people on the benefits of subscribing well-planned critical care insurance, and they have been doing it on various channels, especially digital (because of the activation scope it gives).

ICICI Prudential Life Insurance recently launched a digital campaign that underlines the need to have a well-planned critical insurance in place and how it helps in the most difficult situations of life. The campaign ‘Agar tayyari sahi ho, to jeet pakki hai’ (Victory is inevitable is preparation is well-planned), underlines how timely financial planning can come handy in getting claim amounts as for and when the illness is diagnosed. Titled #TheCoach, the advert – shot in Dharamshala – showcases the journey of a domestic football league's coach, who is struggling to battle his way through cancer.

Conceptualised by Lowe Lintas, the ad opens up to an everyday coaching scene where the coach is training his team. It looks like another Chak De India scene, except this one, has football and a men’s team. Everything goes right until the coach starts coughing and the jump cut takes you to a hospital where the coach is with his wife as the doctor gives them bad news – “It’s cancer.

The treatment has to start immediately and there is a huge expense involved.” This scene reminds us of the old Bollywood movies, This is followed by a series of emotion-filled scenes where the coach reassures his wife that things will be fine as he has planned for medical emergencies well in advance.

The only striking and on-point communication in the ad is the unique selling proposition (USP) highlight which shows hassle-free claims as soon as the claimant is diagnosed with a disease. Of course, the rest of the five-minute long ad shows how everyone wins at the end with proper planning and determination.

One of the major observations from this advert and the industry on a whole is that the way emotions and relations are treated has not changed – neither in our movies, nor in our ad films; they have just become a little more contextual. While it may sound like a cliché, it has worked well for advertisers many a time.

But just because something is working does not mean it is timeless; it is high time the industry starts experimenting with new stories and not the beaten ‘difficulty followed by victory and concluding with happy tears’. Coming back to the ICICI campaign, we think a five-minute ad film is too long for a digital campaign. People do respond to a well-narrated story, but there are many similar stories which are being ‘skipped’, how are you going to win?