Even if you have not seen Guru you would love the song Nanna re nanna re. You could hear it on FM channels, but now, thanks to Hero Cycles, you can watch a portion of it many times a day on television. The beauteous Aishwarya Rai dances and also rides a bicycle to this tune. Shots from the film are interspersed with messages from Hero Cycles. This forms their most recent campaign.

Placing a brand in a movie sequence has been done many times before. To you and me, when we see the hero drinking a particular brand of cold drink or the heroine taking a bite from a particular brand of chocolate, it looks perfectly natural. They are usually orchestrated and decent sums change hands. What possibly has been seen less often is advertising for a brand made with clippings from a movie.

Suddenly there has been a spate of them in recent times — Hrithik in Dhoom:2 and Coke, Priyanka in Salam-e-Ishq and Ira, and Aishwarya in Guru and Hero Cycles. This format has a lot going for it. A popular song or a popular sequence from a movie is a sure recipe for viewer enjoyment. Take the Guru song for instance.

Presence of a star as popular as Ash (and what a presence — rains and Ash, Rahman and Ash, Ratnam and Ash) ensures that eyeballs are drawn. The ad helps a viewer to run in his mind the glorious minutes from the movie again. And who brings you the pleasure? Hero Cycles. Consumer gratitude is guaranteed. To make such an ad independently with the same cast is obviously phenomenal. So there are financial benefits to be had too. Even otherwise, making the ad with clippings from a hit movie, even if it costs the same, comes with the guarantee of consumer acceptance. That is not a mean advantage.

There could be some debates as well. The arguments are not against the format — but relate only to the Hero Cycles ad. Ash rides a ladies cycle. The ad is on cycles for women. Yet as we all know men are more prone to ride bicycles than women in our country. So is that barking up the wrong tree? Are they wasting a lot of money on a minor product line?

The retort could well be that irrespective of the products shown in the ad, the identity that gets the boost through the ad is the umbrella brand Hero Cycles which is unlikely to have any gender bias.

The fear about image connotation, however, remains. Bicycles are for men. To the less privileged men in the lower strata it often is the only affordable symbol of machismo. Would the current film dilute this connotation and make it a sissy brand? Would competitors of Hero Cycles be tempted to exploit this vulnerability? Finally, it is common knowledge that bicycles are far less metropolitan than their mechanised cousins. Guru as a movie, with its storyline, is on the other hand more metro than small urban. Is there a disconnect there? Of course, now that the famous sagai has happened, a movie with Ash and Abhishek may become a “must see” in small urban and rural areas as well.

But the sagai was not a planned event. Thus a doubt creeps in. Was investment in this advertising, initially at least, as prudent as the Coke ad with Dhoom2 or even Ira diamonds ad with Salam-e-Ishq? As a format of advertising clippings from a hit movie have their advantage. But like movies, marketing has no formula too. Both demand fresh efforts every time and a lot more than short cuts.