Advertising. Advertising is acquiring more colour!

Bold colours are all the rage these days. Be it the sharp red outline of an iPhone 7 against a rich red backdrop on a Reliance Jio hoarding, or the purple polka dots intermingling with the yellow-orange of Parle Agro’s Frooti, or the vivid #wearecolours campaign by United Colors of Benetton, advertising has noticeably taken on extra shades of colour.

A powerful medium, advertisers and designers say colours can not only change one’s mood, but also deepen the relationship with the brand. Colourful information also affects the decision-making process and is surprisingly effective.

“We are not merely guided by logic when making purchases. We tend to be driven by less identifiable factors such as emotions,” says Ab Gaur, Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Verticurl, a WPP firm into demand generation and marketing automation.

“Every gimmicky effect in the marketing world is bound to get attention,” Gaur says. Clients are assessing the impact of advertising on consumers and checking whether it is leading to purchases, he adds.

Brand strategy expert Harish Bijoor says, “There is an eminent degree of clutter in our life today. This is compounded by marketing clutter, with different fonts, colours, sounds and even smells attached to marketing of a brand. Given that it is critical for brands to stand out, brands are relying on garish colours.”

To create a zing with its FrootiGoFizzy campaign, Parle Agro decided to increase its market share by innovating. In a 360-degree advertising campaign, conceptualised by New York-based design firm Sameister & Walsh, Parle Agro has rolled out a ₹100-crore advertising blitzkrieg set in a world of optical illusions.

“The garish yellow explodes across television screens in Frooti’s newest ad, though the tonality of the yellow is meant to denote the mango drink,” says Bijoor. “Juxtapose this with brand ambassador Alia Bhat’s green socks and purple outfit. The colour immediately grabs you more than the words,” he adds.

Similarly, rather than rely on text-heavy ads, or only on straightforward images of people or product shots, United Colors of Benetton used stark images of women against a comparative backdrop in recent advertisement. For instance, it has a blonde in a white outfit against a white background, with a simple message ‘I am black’, and has used an Asian woman against a red background with ‘I am yellow’.

Though advertising has always been very content-driven, with high quality storytelling, Tripti Lochan, CEO at VML, a digital agency, says the industry is now making the shift to more visual-led advertising with its colourful palette. Referring to the Frooti campaign, she says the new packaging is put at the centre of the ads in a very artistic way and is a clear message that colourful advertising is here to stay. Designing a bold, brilliantly simple graphic campaign is uppermost with advertisers, she adds, since most are aiming to connect with the modern buyer’s expectation of a continuous, cross-channel, and personal experience.

Explaining the rise in visual advertising, the CEO at VML, which is part of the WPP Group, says the “single biggest change in mobile communication in the last five years has been the shift from text only (SMS) to visual communication through mobile messaging apps (Whatsapp, Hike, and such). The other big constant is the mobile camera, which has led to the rise of the visual message.

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