BlaBlaCar: Travelling Blobs to the rescue

The global ride sharing service has launched its first TVC in India titled 'The Travelling Blobs'.

Claiming to be the world's largest city-to-city ride sharing service, BlaBlaCar has launched its first TV campaign in India titled 'The Travelling Blobs'. It was launched on August 19 and will go on till September 20. The campaign features BlaBlaCar's animated characters, which are used across countries, emphasising the global brand image of the company and its universal appeal.

The first leg of this campaign has been planned for the southern states - Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Telangana and Tamil Nadu. The TV campaign has been created by BlaBlaCar internationally and adapted for India by Elephant Delhi, with Starcom MediaVest Group devising the media plan. The TVC is being aired in four languages - Kannada, Tamil, Telugu and English.

Anjan Roy, director, Elephant Delhi, says, "Despite the existence of well-established public transport networks across the globe, BlaBlaCar is the world's largest ride sharing platform which attests to its rising popularity. As an innovative and young brand, Elephant Delhi captured this spirit in the content and tone of the campaign. Over time, we aim to deepen our association to make BlaBlaCar a vibrant, loveable and popular brand here in India as well."

The TVC, titled 'Problem Yaar', shows animated blobs with a universal appeal across the 19 countries that BlaBlaCar is present in. The colours of the blobs (green and blue) are in line with the brand's colour scheme. The names of the Blobs - Bla and BlaBla - are consistent with their chattiness index.

The ad begins with the green blob, BlaBla, waiting for his train ticket to be confirmed for a trip from Bengaluru to Chennai. As he waits, the blue blob, Bla, is seen refuelling his car for the same journey and worrying about the high cost. Bla then posts his trip on BlaBlaCar through the mobile app, BlaBla decides to buy a seat for the same journey and both are seen leaving together, happily and conveniently.

The co-traveller, BlaBla, has a wider mouth, is younger; while the car owner, Bla, is older and has a smaller mouth indicating lesser talkativeness. Also, their age is in line with the actual demographic of BlaBlaCar's usage - car owners tend to be a bit older than co-travellers.

Talking about the TV campaign, Raghav Gupta, country manager, BlaBlaCar, says, "The insight behind this campaign was that with public transport being always full, last minute travel options in India are limited. BlaBlaCar offers an affordable, friendly and efficient alternative to public transport. This TVC focusses on both sides of the marketplace (car-owners: expensive fuel, co-travellers: lack of travel options) and talks about the value proposition. It also explains how to use BlaBlaCar. We chose to launch our TV campaign in South India as these states are key markets for us."

The campaign will run across channels of the Gemini TV Group, ETV Group, Udaya Group and Sun TV Group, among others.

Speaking about their partnership with BlaBlaCar, Mallikarjundas CR, CEO, Starcom MediaVest Group, says, "BlaBlaCar is an awesome win for us. What makes working on BlaBlaCar exciting is that we are working together to drive attribution and accountability at the most granular level - a single TV / Radio spot. In doing so, we move the principles of media planning on traditional media one step closer towards digital."

BlaBlaCar claims to be the world's leading long-distance ride sharing platform and has created a global, trusted community of car owners and co-travellers in 19 countries. The site and mobile apps connect people looking to travel long distances with car owners going the same way, so they can travel together and share the cost.

Elephant Delhi is a strategic branding and design consultancy with offices in NCR, Pune and Singapore.