Calvin: You can’t just turn on creativity like a faucet. You have to be in the right mood.
Hobbes: What mood is that?
Calvin: Last-minute panic.

During our first ever TV campaign during New Years Eve (yeah, the slap ads – links at the bottom of this post), we started working on creating the commercials after buying media space. We really only had 4 days to execute the commercial and get the tapes over to the TV channels. True to Calvin, we managed to create a decent product. We’ve never really believed in agencies to do this work – we have already wasted our time and money with one of the most popular web viral creation agencies in India to get zero results. We agree that these agencies have some of the best creative minds of our generation, but they are swamped with so much work that they can’t really do justice to a startup like us.

All of us here at Zomato, are living in a box. Not literally, but it is hard to get new ideas after creating and working on a product for over three years. In the recent past, we ran a campaign where we asked our users to blog us their feedback about Zomato.com – it was a smash hit for us and we got invaluable feedback and ideas from our users.  A lot of it, we incorporated in our current iteration of the product.

On a much bigger scale, we now want our users to create innovative TV ads for us. The prize is good and I am hoping it will excite a lot of lesser known agencies and animators to put together their best and come up with something which can never come out of a professional agency. Don’t know if any other startup/company has tried anything like this before in India, but an experiment either works or fails. We are so hoping that it works!

The rules of the game are available at: www.zomato.com/tvc

New Year Commercial Links

http://youtu.be/JZK_Ej4MzYc

http://youtu.be/QQs4JuG-sxg