Volkswagen is indulging in an expensive innovation in India when the brand salience doesn’t exist

I am all for media innovations. The route helps smash the raging clutter, and more importantly, it helps provide a great opportunity for a brand to further embellish its core values, and enhance the brand salience. In my many years in the advertising biz as a creative director, I would DEMAND that the team think out of the box when it came to innovations. So that the idea for the brand could find interesting new avenues to breathe in.
 
What also helped our cause was this: scarred by the sizzling competition, and fighting over crumbs from a limited ad pie, the media proprietors were only too willing to offer time and space for wild innovations. And in recent times, this desperation has become even more evident. In fact, these are days of paid news!! 

In this context, Volkswagen’s strategy of digging a hole on every page of The Times of India’s supplement to announce the launch of their hatchback called Polo caught my attention. Clearly dug by the German carmaker to be heard above all the din being made by so many auto giants. Fair enough. It got noticed. And talked about. But here’s my problem with this so-called innovation: apart from an inconvenient (for the reader) gimmick, what does the car cut-out achieve for the branding? I mean, that hole, cut to the shape of a car, can be used by any auto-maker, right? How is that trick distinctive for Polo? Completely beats me. Why indulge in an expensive innovation when the brand salience doesn’t exist? Unless they are planning to sell Polos with holes on the windscreens! (Okay, that’s a bad joke). Methinks this idea would have been a cool innovation for Nestlé’s Polo, the mint with a hole. Now that makes immense brand sense. In fact, during my stint with Lowe, Delhi, where I was handling Polo, we used to dabble in various innovative ideas for the brand. And now I feel like kicking myself… why didn’t I think of it?
 
So, aside from the fact that the holes carry little value for the brand, there’s also the minor detail that it doesn’t augur well for publications to be digging holes in their pages—it’s a huge irritant for the readers. Recession or no recession. Already those damned half pagers make it very inconvenient to hold the newspaper. So then what next? A cut-out of a skyscraper when a loaded builder wants to innovate? Why not? Anything’s possible these days. As long as there are no holes in the news itself! But that, as they say, is another story altogether!