I am sure most you would have seen the recent eServe commercial. Did you like it? Isn’t a third world commercial? Why on earth other than anyone other the current employees and possibly the aspirants of the organization excited about the name change?

Honestly, I am not able to understand what they are trying to acheive by burning so much of monies in premium Television channels. Sure, Citigroup prefix sounds pretty good but surely not something that tickle me enough to pull the train’s “emergency stop” chain.

I am not sure, the team must have been on LSD and induced some to the management to get the budget cleared. The effect of the commercial is such, I want to jump across the room, grab the remote and change the channel the moment I see the guy holding a mic in his hand and whining out of his wits. If the television set is either not mine or anyone who I know, I do not mind throwing a huge stone.

Over a month ago, I had met up with an old friend of mine who is planning to start a marketing services business. He has an interesting idea on in-house marketing – a model to market a brand/organization to the existing workforce, an idea driven towards keeping the morale and enthusiasm up thus (hopefully) increase throughput and reduce employee churn rate.

Overlapping this model to eServe, it would have been good to run meaningful marketing programmes to the employee base and institutions where they do campus recruitment. Also, its quite possible to find out where an usual/average job application originates (say Monster.Com)and run marketing programmes in such properties.

The current approach by CGS (erstwhile eServe) is awfully expensive. So many repeats of 15/30 second spots in preimium television channels.

Whatever you had aimed to showcase to the entire world through the Above the Line activity has (going with ‘audience should at least watch three times to reach a buying decision”) happened over a week. Save your budget and use it where the returns could be high. Or, is it one of those initiatives where you have to exhaust your marketing budget, otherwise your next year will take a hit?