Dev Anand's 'Paying Guest' inspired ICICI Bank's new ads on a product for house owners and tenants

A quick chat with Abhay Mehta, founder of Surat-based ‘Aagey Se Right’, which made the two adsads for Rent@Click.

ICICI Bank’s new ads for house owners and tenants may have upended the notion that banking ads are on weak footing when it comes to creativity.

Made by Aagey Se Right, a Surat-based creative agency, the two ads have everything you’d expect out of a 1950s movie: black and white treatment, the ‘ji’ marker of respect when addressing someone, and the classic trope of a tenant falling in love with the landlord’s daughter.

Rent@Click is a rent collection platform that captures rent flows from both the landlords and tenants.

In an interesting revelation, Mehta tells us that while they were in discussions with the client (ICICI Bank), they stumbled upon ‘Paying Guest’, a Dev Anand-starrer from 1957, where he enjoys a romance with his landlord’s daughter.

During the making of the ads, Mehta and his team were careful to not exaggerate or spoof, say, Dev Anand’s hand gestures to come off as humorous. “We wanted anybody who watched our ads to feel it was a film from the 1950s,” says Abhay Mehta, founder of Aagey Se Right.

This is not the first time Aagey Se Right has worked for ICICI Bank. Earlier this year, it wrote and executed an Acappella-themed video for the bank’s ‘iMobile Pay’ offering.