Iconic Ads: A Paper Boat ride down the river of memories

Paper Boat has a history of using nostalgia to promote its products. The brand wanted to establish a stronger customer connection using childhood memories. The brief given to Karishma Lintas was, ‘make us a film that’s about drinks and memories’,”

The campaign was targeted primarily at metros and the urban Indian population from SEC A, B, between 20-40 years.

Rajesh Ramaswamy recollects that even before the brand came to his agency, he had been a fan of the brand proposition and its communication (thanks to Fisheye).

He gives credit to Neeraj Kakkar, the CEO “The entire vision of this brand was a passionate project of the founder him. He wanted to recreate the recipes lost over time, and the innocence that surrounded those memories was something he wanted to keep alive”

The trigger on which the creative team was working on Original and Simple. It was indeed a challenge to create a story that is original, simple around childhood memories. It took 4 months of crafting and recrafting.

Rajesh says “The deal was really to bring this alive, and not get over creative with it. We wanted as many people to connect with it. So it wasn’t about unique memories as much as universal ones. Like we all have used perfumed erasers and smelt the notebook after erasing. All of us have chased kites. So we drew up a long list of such universal memories and then decided to bring them alive through poetry. Again a lost form at least during that time in advertising. And who better than Gulzar Saab for that.

And to fuse that with another universal favourite, Malgudi Days. Which evoked the same feeling across people. In fact, instead of doing a regular briefing to Gulzar Saab, we decided to write a poem to him, asking him to return the favour. We designed a book as a brief, that captured all our memories, along with a poem, asking him to return the favour.

Rajesh directed this film, and he was helped in creative by Ujjwal Kabra, Rexena Devraj, Indrasish Mukherjee, Adarsh Atal, Sayan Mukherjee

The visual treatment of using a shift and tilt lens to capture this mood was DOP Laxman’s idea so that it takes into this hazy fuzzy world of beautiful memories.

It was filmed in Mumbai, Kanakapura and Devarayana Samudra. The famous Carnatic duo Ganesh and Kumaresh gave the background score

Aptly titled ‘A Paper Boat ride down the river of memories’.

It is perhaps uncanny that one of the first murals painted in the head office Hector Beverages many years ago was of the classic Malgudi railway station.