Last year, Indians saw one of the best marketing campaigns we had seen in a long time. A lot of people couldn’t make any sense of it, but that’s the thing. It wasn’t supposed to make sense for everyone.
The campaign was titled, “not everyone gets it” and was launched by credit card management company, CRED.
In this blog post, we try to decode the genius behind the series of videos that sent so many of us tapping away at our phones to heed Bappi Lahiri’s call and download CRED.
The “not everyone gets it ” campaign was CRED’s first major ad campaign, and as far as first ads go, this one was a show-stealer. The campaign drove enough revenue to cement CRED’s status as an official sponsor of IPL, India’s biggest sporting event. Interestingly, IPL was the event where the ads had premiered for the first time.
The ads saw many stars from the 90s, superstars like Anil Kapoor, and Madhuri Dixit, all auditioning to appear in CRED’s first-ever ad, and failing to make the cut. The ads became increasingly hilarious, as none of the stars was given a script, and each input their own versions of what the ad should look like.
Many people could make no sense of what was going on, and how exactly CRED helps them. But the shock value of this ad soon made it very popular. People started sharing memes on the internet.
But here’s the cool part, CRED has a very specific customer base that it wanted to target with the call to action. Specifically, people with an Experian credit score of 750 or more. Being an exclusive club for people with higher credit scores, it really didn’t have anything to do with anyone else.
CRED’s target customers, however, largely coincided with the same set of people who would take the initiative and do a little bit of research to find out more about this weird credit card company showing “audition reels” for ads.
So, a couple of weeks after the ads were launched, CRED started seeing growth. A lot of growth.
CRED’s daily registrations became six times what it was originally, and they penned a contract with IPL to officially sponsor them for the next three years.
By what was seemingly a masterstroke, CRED reached a very large number of people and managed to filter out the specific people it needed to in a single campaign.
It used humor to grab the eyes, and the specific but slightly vague value propositions to filter it. It worked wonders for them, and now CRED has over 3 million active members in its club.
The CRED journey didn’t stop there though. Since then it has had more youtube ads, featuring other stars and some hilarious banter over its Twitter handle-
The descriptions for CRED’s youtube ads say this-
But it seems increasingly likely that CRED could actually make for a pretty good ad-making business.
At least with some sporting superstars from the 90s to help them out.