Behind Urban Company’s quest to bridge the respect gap between India's blue-collar & white-collar workers

Its three ads, from Talented.Agency, show how India looks at and thinks of the work Urban Company’s professionals perform.

Urban Company’s (UC) new ad wraps up a trio of commercials examining how India’s white-collar populace views blue-collar jobs and workers. In this case, the UC professionals.

Chhoti Baat revolves around workplace bias, and how each worker, in the end, wants respect for his labour. Chhoti Soch delicately addresses how unfounded stigmas around a career can affect relationships, and Chhota Kaam celebrates all kinds of jobs, not just the high-flying ones.

All three adverts have sparked conversations about labour and dignity, as well as the creative treatment independent agency Talented and director Kopal Naithani, founder and director of Superfly Films, chose to apply.

The last famous example of a brand speaking about labour and dignity was in 2018 when Swiggy, through an ad film, users to call its delivery executives by their names rather than just referring to them as "Swiggy."

Swiggy aimed to address and change our biases at that time, and UC is pursuing a similar goal now.

A change in ad strategy 

Watching three purpose-driven ads from UC raises eyebrows. For the longest time, the home services booking app released ads that tied back to the brand’s services more than anything else.

“Over the years, we have focused on building categories because they form the bulk of the use cases on our platform, and so most marketing efforts have been category-first,” explains Tarun Menon, marketing director, Urban Company.

Over the last three years, cleaning has emerged as UC’s most in-demand service, having taken the slot from AC repair & service. “It is our lead category through which we acquire users,” states Menon.

Acquiring new users is where the brand saw the issue and the insight that led to, as director Naithani dubs it, the “Chhotaverse.”

"It boiled down to this underlying cultural barrier between what is white-collar work and blue-collar work, ‘Because the person (UC professional) comes from a slightly different background than me, I need to be wary of him. I'm not sure whether this person is safe or not." explains Menon.

When asked if news reports from June 2023 about UC workers protesting against the brand’s new rules that led to job losses influenced these ads, Menon said there is no connection, and that the brand’s talks with Talented predate it.

YouTube remains the lead media vehicle for the Chhotaverse ads, but taking the whole brand into perspective, “Meta platforms and Google take 80% of our spends.” Google here is YouTube, Google Display Network, and Google Display & Video 360 (DV360). UC spends on Connected TVs (CTV) too “depending on the time of the year because categories are largely seasonal.”

Chhoti Soch was advertised on Disney+ Hotstar a few months after its release. There is, however, no such plan for Chhoti Baat.

A lack of TV presence  

Causing behavioural change is easier when everybody in the family is exposed to it, UC’s Chhotaverse ads are missing from television and have missed big-ticket media events such as the Indian Premier League (IPL), the T20 Men’s Cricket World Cup, and even the ongoing Olympics.

“When we look at the media habits of our user base, they spend a large chunk of their time online,” says the marketing director and adds, “We have moved to CTV, as opposed to pure-play SD or HDTV because we find the return on investment on acquisition is higher, the ability to find relevant potential users is also higher.”

All three ads are over a minute-and-a-half in length with Chhoti Soch nearly touching four minutes, surely the length must have influenced the media buying. “Our first instinct has never been worrying about ‘Will this perform? Will people really watch this?’” says Aakash Desai, strategy, Talented.

Director Naithani says there are discussions about whether to shorten something “but if shortening it comes in the way of insight, in terms of storytelling, in what we are going to convey, we do not sacrifice that.”

Also, she feels no pressure to direct the ad in such a way that one comes to the point right away, considering the viewers’ deteriorating focus levels. “I think films which want to come to the point right away are designed for it, written for it, are made that way.” The Chhotaverse is designed to make you stop and examine your biases.

Exhaustion of biases

Take any work that challenges societal behaviours through examples, you cannot help but wonder how many more relevant examples remain. Leena Gupta, creative and founding member, Talented, praises the ‘Bias Bank’ of the agency’s planner Sai Karthik.

It is a sort of anthropological survey, where he talks to UC partners, and asks about the issues they are facing. These surveys are done for the sole purpose of unearthing the prejudices they are facing at work every day.

“These prejudices are at the intersection of caste, of class, of gender, of region, of religion, etc. They make sure that all the films we have done, are not just hypothetical scenarios, but are born from real lived experiences of the UC partners.”

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To double down on the authenticity, the agency roped in Balram Vishwakarma, a digital influencer (one of the founders of the popular Andheri West Shit Posting Instagram handle) who speaks on caste, gender, and society, and ethnographer Gravi Dhar as consultants. She consulted on Chhoti Soch, and he has on Chhota Kaam and Chhoti Baat.

Many have also praised the ad’s writing which is a big thing because with such kinds of work, there is a fine line between writing that influences and that is preachy. There was constant refurbishing, says Naithani. “We went line by line. ‘Is this sounding too much? Is this sounding too less? Do I want to hear this? How would I feel if someone did this with me?’ And that's how we did it.”

“The KPI was not to break the clutter. It was to break biases,” remarks Desai.