Tata Motors recently released their latest campaign for Tata Motors trucks, ‘Desh Ke Trucks’. Using humour as the main element, the films talk about the various technologies that the vehicle company is bringing out. Four of the five films launched under the campaign has characters from popular web series Panchayat.

Talking about the insights behind using the characters of the series, Shubhranshu Singh, Vice President - Marketing -Domestic & IB at Tata Motors, said, “The Panchayat jodi was loved by the audience when they launched a similar campaign in September 2022, and so we are banking on the same characters to woo the audience this time too.” 

Talking specifically about influencer marketing, Singh shared, “When it comes to influencer marketing, we do it in parts. Part of it is done through corporate communication. We are choosing micro and nano influencers. We found that the micro and nano influencers have much more engagement with their followers. We have tied up with an agency. The budget is in low thousands average bases. It is quite affordable compared to any other form of advertising.”

While influencer and advertising-led content is something that every company does, some brands these days are also investing on content surrounding the brand. Speaking on the same, Singh said, “Yes, we are open to that idea. But is there anything that we are going to inaugurate tomorrow, no.”

“From a media point of view, there is no doubt that this cable-cutting thing is an endemic and everything is shifting to digital. But in online, not everything is fetching the same returns. Creating content requires heavy investments, but returns are less.”

When it comes to reaching out to consumers, WhatsApp also has become an effective way to reach consumers. Talking about it, Singh shared, “It is quite fascinating to see what many brands are doing using WhatsApp. There is no doubt that communication is happening through platforms like WhatsApp. Social media has become a reach-based platform selling stories and there is a lot of engagement happening on platforms like WhatsApp. We are there on WhatsApp, as our consumers use it.”

“But I think it is less about content and more about transaction. They aren’t creating any content on WhatsApp. We are in touch with Meta to create a business application. There is also a possibility of business chatbot. The problem with channel building is that putting the pipe is easy but being consistent to put content is tough.”

Speaking about their plans to make the most of the digital channels, Singh said, “We are going to go ahead with the second set of campaign from February on digital. Also our lead generation has shifted to digital. In the last one year, we have started doing programmatic advertising, both search-originated as well as on social platforms to campaign pages. We are also working with affiliation aggregators. I am happy to report that we are at double digits in terms of contribution of digital sales to overall sales.”

The ‘Desh ke Trucks’ campaign has been conceptualised and executed by the in-house team of the company along with creative agency Black or White Brand Communication Pvt. Ltd. the teams also spoke about why Panchayat characters were taken in the campaigns, they said, “What we learnt from the first set of campaign, is that humour is really working and we wanted to take this technology communication through them.”