Iconic Ads: Fevicol – Bus Ka Jod

Fevicol advertising is, as people would say, ‘Hatke’! It has moved beyond the physical adhesiveness between surfaces to a more metaphorical one. The ‘Fevicol Ka Jod’ is just not physical but relates to relationships of different kinds, a bond created between people, things etc. Leveraging this metaphorical aspect, Ogilvy has created some path-breaking advertising.

The quirkiness, humour and at times, subtlety, has worked extremely well, all in an Indian scenario (local). One location which has been used very often has been Rajasthan. While the brothers Pandey (Piyush and Prasoon) do say it was not intentional, given the fact they were brought up, there is perhaps the reason why so many of the slices of life from there, lent themselves well to Fevicol.

All good storytellers borrow from life and the Pandey brothers have just done that.

When they were kids, they used to travel by bus from Jaipur to Jobner to visit an aunt- a good 2 hours journey which they used to travel alone. These buses were overloaded with people, animals like goats, chickens etc. also used to travel along. On these trips, they used to see some unique interesting characters. All these experiences stayed with them, which they used in advertising.

There were 200 people in and on the bus for the ad. And the cast came from the surrounding villages in and around Jaisalmer where the film was shot.

The interesting music was an inspiration from another track by Taufiq Qureshi (Pt Zakir Hussain’s brother), a noted percussionist himself, for an album called Rhythm. Loy Mendonsa (Shankar, Ehsaan, Loy fame) was introduced to Taufiq and worked with him to twist the original score to get a new feel.

Interestingly this commercial has been featured on the Rajasthan Tourism website.

Perhaps this commercial would have been never made if not for Prasoon Pandey. The inspiration for this film was a print ad. The print ad was a story by itself. It took Prasoon two months to figure out he could get a film.

He decided to take everything as a step and slow the whole process down. Roads were dug, to get the bumpy feel; eight rows of seats for the proper effect and to top it all, a cantankerous goat who want to pee only when the film was being shot. But it was well worth the effort