The Ghost in Our Shells

Link to ad – Play it different | ft. Ravi Shastri | CRED

CRED is a FinTech Indian startup that was founded in 2018. It helps you pay credit card bills and gives you rewards, called CRED Coins which can be used to claim cashback offers, which is the main focus of the ads. Despite providing a fundamental and essential service, the ads made for their product are over the top, costly, and starring icons of Indian popular culture.

The ad being analyzed is called “Play it different” starring World Cup-winning cricketer, Ravi Shastri. It is set in a party setting and plays to the sound of a groovy soundtrack that would fit right into a club with the words “Oh, Mr. Shastri” being repeated throughout.

It begins with Shastri dressed in his Coach uniform speaking to a team of cricketers, telling them there are only 70 minutes, drilling a sense of seriousness into the viewer with the music also being tense. It suddenly changes when he says that happy hours will end after those 70 minutes, showing us the entire scene is inside a club and they are there to party.

The next scene also starts with a serious utterance of “Keep your eyes on the ball” implying a cricket match but then it turns out to be a game of beer pong. We then see an interviewer asking Shastri if they will be partying after the game, and after an answer of “No”, the team bursts into laughter.

The ad progresses into a party scene that includes a lot of old people partying in a club with Shastri in his coach uniform. He flirts with a younger woman with a cricket-based icebreaker. There is also a shot of him on a cycle sweating, meant to portray how attractive Ravi is.

We see another question by the journalist being shut down with a blunt answer with the team cheering on their coach.

The next scene portrays the cricketers popping a champagne bottle, with Ravi running in scolding them not for drinking alcohol in locker rooms, but for wasting the alcohol. In the next scene, he goes up to a table with a whiskey glass and ice, giving us the illusion of a bar, but in reality, it is a chemist’s shop and instead of whiskey he asks for 2 cough syrups, shocking both viewers and chemists.

For the first time since the ad started 45 seconds ago, the narrator starts talking about CRED, the app being advertised over scenes of Ravi partying. The narrator says that being Ravi Shastri is fun and is then cut off by Ravi himself saying “But not as fun as paying your credit card bills on CRED”. He then puts on a hat and drives off in a bar car of sorts, with women, embracing the womanizer claims made by the movie Azhar in 2016, which Shastri vehemently denied. An animation depicting CRED then plays. The ad ends with a shot of Shastri stuck in traffic in his bar car with all the women.

This entire ad is an ironic take on the ad campaign of CRED itself. CRED purposefully uses over-the-top portrayals and actors to sell a very basic service. Similarly, Shastri who has a public persona of being a respectable sportsperson is shown engaging in debauchery. It challenges the audience’s expectation of him by starting scenes in a serious tone and immediately switching to a light-hearted, party-based portrayal. Another thing to note here is that even though the ad portrays Ravi Shastri who is old, the user base for the app is primarily young people and the ad targets them. The ad doesn’t tell the audience CRED is the best, it shows them. The ad is a portrayal of a cool lifestyle and implies that these people use CRED.

Another way this ad works is by using its target audience. Every time CRED releases an ad, Twitter and Instagram make memes about it for days on end. Ravi Shastri himself tweeted out a light hearted take on the ad. Memetic devices are proven methods of spreading awareness about something and CRED uses that by making their ad campaign a giant meme in itself. The ad is meant to keep the audience’s attention and make them talk about it.

This has resulted in CRED becoming an ad maestro. It doesn’t matter if in 10 years the app will fade into obscurity, these ads will always be remembered.

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