[Campaign Face Off] The Perfect Partner v/s Your Best Diwali Gift

Social Samosa takes a look at which brand campaign performed better between OnePlus 5's The Perfect Partner and Oppo F3's Your Best Diwali Gift. 

With Diwali near the corner, OnePlus 5 and Oppo F3 launched their respective festive creatives, with similar execution and messaging strategy on the digital platform. Here’s a Campaign Face Off comparing the communication route taken by these brands.

Both Oppo F3 and OnePlus 5 released campaigns with the intention of placing their products as the ultimate Diwali gifting option.

OnePlus 5 The Perfect Partner

OnePlus released their Diwali campaign titled 'The Perfect Partner for a #HappyDiwali” to mark the beginning of the festivities. On YouTube, the campaign has clocked more than 13 million views since its launch.

The film highlights the story of Diwali who lacks a partner and someone who can help her retain the title of the ‘Star Performer’ and help her through multi-tasking and making the festival memorable for everyone. OnePlus 5 comes to her rescue as the perfect partner for Diwali brightens her up with the power of 8GB RAM, highest resolution Dual Camera System and Dash Charge for fastest charging, making for a #HappyDiwali.

Oppo F3 #YourBestDiwaliGift

The brand launched a digital film titled Your Best Diwali Gift for their new Oppo F3 Selfie expert in a 6:43 minute long film. The film has garnered more than 2 million views on the brand's YouTube channel.

The film features Indian cricketers Virat Kohli, Shikhar Dhawan, R.Ashwin, and Rohit Sharma. These men while walking around a quaint museum and admiring the artifacts, get stunned when a mannequin of a beautiful woman comes to life suddenly. The rest of the story revolves around what happens next with the boys.

The objective of the brand through the campaign is to highlight the Oppo F3 Diwali edition phone, which has been specially customized for Diwali and is being put across as a perfect gift option during this festive time.

Social Chatter

On social media, Oppo is having conversations around the film and there is a contest on the platform to further promote the Your Best Diwal iGift idea.

OnePlus on the other hand, has not managed to create enough noise on social media. Other than sharing links and teasers from their Diwali campaign, the brand is not doing anything else to promote it.

Expert Take - The Perfect Partner v/s Your Best Diwali Gift

We asked Anthony Padaychi from BC Web Wise and  Prasad Ajgaonkar, CEO iRealties to give their views on which campaign stood out in terms of the concept and who managed to create a stronger brand recall.

Both of them are highly disappointed with the creatives, however, they also unanimously agree that OnePlus Diwali campaign weaves in the product features better and because of its shorter duration, it stands out.

Anthony Padayachi, Associate Creative Director, BC Web Wise said, "OnePlus’ Diwali outshines Oppo’s apsara; appealing to its evolved consumer base. While both stories adopt the ‘damsel in distress’ theme with an identical end message, OnePlus manages to keep it 4 minutes shorter, and 40 times cheaper, I’m guessing."

He feels both stories lose out, only because of a way too generic ‘Diwali brief’. "Almost every brand tries to position its product as the #BestDiwaliGift during the festive season. Interesting briefs and insights lead to interesting advertising; for instance, Lenovo’s #GiftThemAFuture digital film has a strong insight at core - it resonates with a relevant yet untapped idea of using our Diwali shopping budget to do something meaningful for our parents, nicely integrating the product proposition into the festive spirit. Back to the face off, both ads don’t really stand out when it comes to brand connect," Padayachi adds.

Echoing similar views, Prasad Ajgaonkar, CEO, iRealties feels both advertisements are waste of resources and loss of opportunity.  "The exact purpose of the content is confusing and efforts are spent on visuals which in no way add value to the brand or the features of the product marketed. Here in both cases, the products themselves are coming too late in the films and, most of the viewers must have dropped out of it due to the irrelevance and predictability."

According to Ajkaonkar, in the OnePlus ad film, they could have shown Diwali, actually using OnePlus to spread happiness around or by gifting OnePlus to various users relating to the relevant features of the phone. This would have associated the phone with happiness as well as the opportunity to bring out the relevance of the features.

"The Oppo ad film has wasted a lot of resources on extremely repeated narratives and stretching the users’ patience. For a single feature of selfies they have wasted almost 6 minutes of the users’ time. And finally it doesn't even give situation to compare the quality of selfies as to why it is a selfie phone. I will not go with any of the film as it does not solve any purpose of product promotion at all. Such a huge budget could have been used for much better engagement," Ajkaonkar concludes.