Ambience's Elsie Nanji (second from left), Prasanna M. Sankhe (extreme left), and K.B. Vinod (extreme right) with JK Ansell's Anirudha Deshmukh: sporting success

No. 1: Kamasutra Sport: The World's Favourite Sport

If the two men in ambience's creative team that worked on the Kamasutra Sport account regret not working with semi-nude female models, then they have only themselves to blame. The client JK Ansell didn't have any issues if they did: all it wanted was a campaign featuring the word 'Sport', and sharply focused on the 18-25 years age group. The team steered away from the usual stereotype-semi-clad models-and hit upon the lateral Big Idea of sex being a sport. The resulting punchline, ''the world's favourite sport'' takes the skin off conventional condom advertising. The client loved it. ''Our aim was to rejuvenate the brand (KS had been launched in 1991) and make it more appealing to the younger generation,'' says Anirudha Deshmukh, Executive Director, JK Ansell. The pygmy-sized budget they had to work with (Rs 8 lakh), and the big brother-like eye of the advertising watchdog, the Advertising Standards Council of India, led Ambience to focus on the tube, and make the campaign subtle (at least as far as condom advertising goes).

Three ads, built around snooker, swimming, and football went on air in May 2001. ''It (the campaign) was witty, enjoyable, and makes great use of the brand name,'' says Elsie Nanji, the vice-chairperson and chief creative officer of Ambience. But did it work? Well, JK expected to sell around 500,000 units a month post-campaign. Today, it does 600,000.

O&M's Piyush Pande: It was the dogs

No. 2: Ponds Cold Cream: Googly, Woogly, Wooksh

You won't find the names Babe and Sunshine in the team that created the campaign, but they're the real stars behind it. The two are canine companions of Ogilvy & Mather's Group President and National Creative Director Piyush Pandey, and the idea came to him when he was playing with them at home-and indulging in some doggiespeak, naturally. That nonsensical phrase formed the basis for a Ponds Cold Cream campaign, replete with a tightly edited montage of slice-of-life shots set to the music of in-demand musical duo Ehsaan and Loy. ''It is a simple campaign that captures endearing moments of everyday life,'' says Pandey. The campaign serves a higher need too. ''From a functional platform, this campaign elevated Ponds cold cream to a sharp emotional platform,'' explains Vivek Rampal, Business Head (Skin Care), Hindustan Lever Ltd. The result is a campaign that doesn't overload consumers with information, like some of Ponds' campaigns did in the past, but remembers to tell them as much as they need to know. Bottomline: Googly, Woogly... seems to be working: after the campaign was launched in October 2001, the brand has witnessed a 14 per cent growth in volumes.

McCann's Pandrang Row: high on water

No. 3: Kinley: Koi Rang Nahin...

Water is water is water, right? Not quite, according to Pandrang Row, Executive Creative Director, McCann-Erickson, India. ''Indians, unlike Europeans or Americans, are quite comfortable with emotions,'' says the man, by way of explanation of how McCann gave the Kinley campaign an emotional context. The client, Coca-Cola India, believes this delivery itself clearly differentiated the brand from the competition. ''In a category that isn't functionally differentiated, this was great work in differentiating the brand on an emotional plane,'' says Shripad Nadkarni, Vice President (Marketing), Coca-Cola India.

An earthy background score and enough slice-of-life visuals in it to satisfy the sentimentalists give the brand a much broader significance than just 'bottled drinking water', a result that, according to lyricist Prateek Bhardwaj, was exactly what was desired. ''For me the brief was very clear: bring out the feel, colour, and scale of emotions associated with rain and water-not just be stuck on the brand.'' The Business Today-nfo-mbl survey ranks this advertising campaign high on all parameters, except uniqueness. That is only to be expected: slice-of-life advertising is overused in the Indian context. Maybe, Ogilvy & Mather, to which the account has now moved, would do well to remember that.

HTA's Syed Usman (right with Prasanta Mukherjee (second from right), and Alok Bose (second from left), with Pepsico India's Arjun Srivastava: driving it home

No. 4: Pepsi: Hai Koi Jawaab!

Whoever said promotional advertising (for the ignorant: that which accompanies a sales promotion) can't be entertaining? This five-ad campaign may be the only of the kind to figure in the top 10, but it does prove a point. True to brand Pepsi's irreverent image, the campaign was a lateral take on the business of game shows with celebrity anchors-Kaun Banega Crorepati with Amitabh Bachchan on Star Plus, Sawaal Das Crore Ka with Anupam Kher and Manisha Koirala on Zee, and Jeeto Chappar Phad Ke with Govinda on Sony-with Cyrus Broacha putting the heat back on them. ''People were sick of game shows and their hosts, and we latched on to that,'' explains Syed Usman, Associate Vice President and Senior Creative Director, Hindustan Thompson Associates.

''What we needed was a new ad, that would leverage our new endorser, Amitabh Bachchan, even while ensuring continuity of Cyrus Broacha,'' says Arjun Srivastava, Executive Vice President, Pepsico India, referring to Broacha's involvement in an earlier promotion titled Mera Number Ayega. But it wasn't just that: the campaign featured four other Pepsi endorsers (Preity Zinta, Rahul Dravid, V.V.S. Laxman, and Harbhajan Singh) apart from B&B.

The success of this campaign was key to Pepsi's plans for the summer of 2001. But un-seasonal rains lashed large parts of North India in mid-year, the peak sale season for soft drink sales, and spoiled the company's celebrity-party. Maybe Pepsi will have a jawaab to that in 2002.

Lowe Mumbai's Balki (right), and K.V. Sridhar: It's the glass, silly

No. 5: Saint-Gobain: Clear Glass From Saint-Gobain

The best thing about saint- Gobain glass is the lack of glass,'' says Sridhar K.V., Creative Director, Lowe India. This cryptic-sounding statement was the core idea behind a product-oriented campaign that extols clarity. The client, the Chennai-based French multinational Saint-Gobain, wished to project itself as the best glass manufacturer in the country and corner at least a 10 per cent marketshare in the process. The logic of taking the creative route they eventually did, says Balki (yup, that's it, just like Bjork), Creative Director, Lowe, was ''When you're converting a commodity into a brand, specially in a low involvement category like glass, you need to entertain people.'' The result is two short ads, 30 seconds and 25 seconds, that revolve around the theme of glass so clear, it's practically invisible. Almost international in execution (that was part of the client's brief too), the campaign was shot in two days flat within a small production budget of Rs 20 lakh.

''What was exciting was that we were working in a segment where no advertising work had been done in this country,'' adds Sridhar. Today, the agency claims, consumers ask for Saint-Gobain by name and the brand's marketshare stands at 28 per cent, nearly three times the target.

Lowe Bangalore's Rahul Sengupta (front) and Vinod Moolacherry: the ad W.O.R.K.E.D.

No. 6: Indya.com: As E.A.S.Y. As Talking

How's this for a pyrrhic victory: the portal may have all but downed its shutters, but the campaign still lives on. ''The promotion worked fantastically for them, but the advertising was way ahead of the product,'' says Rahul Sengupta, Creative Director, Lowe India.

The Bangalore-based portal hired Lowe way back in April 2000. The campaign, it stressed, needed to create a unique image or brand-no mean task, given that Indya was a late entrant into a crowded horizontal portal market. It took the creative team 10 days to come up with the core idea for the client. This included a two-night 'offsite' at The Club (a resort outside Bangalore) where Sengupta claims all they did was play badminton.

The common thread running through the advertising campaign was that India is everywhere in the world. Hence, the three 20-second launch clips that featured traditional Indian characters like a vada-pau seller in foreign locales like the London Underground and Trafalgar Square.

This was followed with a memorable campaign for chat on Indya.com. Pity, then, that Indya went belly up before being rescued by Rupert Murdoch and transformed into an extension of his television business. Like what its launch campaign said, ''It happens only in Indya.''

HTA's Swati Bhattarcharya (left) with Prasanta Mukherjee (centre), and Pepsico India's Arjun Srivastava: scripting a mega success

No. 7: Pepsi: Yeh Dil Maange More

Wouldn't all of us behave the same way if Amitabh Bachchan were to drop in, unannounced?'' asks Swati Bhattacharya, Associate Vice President and Senior Creative Director, Hindustan Thompson Associates. That may be debatable, but fact is, some of us certainly would. The ad captures this in vivid detail: the head of the household insisting on a 'family photo'; the daughter on having AB speak into the phone intoning his famous oneliner from gameshow KBC; and the son insisting that Pepsi be served to the star in a 'cut glass'.

It is only the child-Rahul is his name-who is diffident to the presence of Bachchan. He is portrayed as having a mind of his own, is cool, and doesn't get overawed. Rahul, claims Pepsi, is the embodiment of the brand. ''The salience of this campaign lies in its use of Amitabh, now in his late fifties, to endorse a youth brand like Pepsi,'' says Arjun Srivastava, Executive Vice-President (Marketing), Pepsico India. And the story of the star walking into a typical upper middle class household-the big soft belly of the brand's target audience-seems to have struck a chord with the masses.

No. 8: Axe Deodorant: The Axe Effect

This is the only global campaign to feature in our Top 10. And we wonder why an advertiser as obsessed with staying local, as Hindustan Lever Ltd, decided to go with an international hand-me-down?

Priti Nair Chakravarthy, Unit Creative Director, Lowe India, has a ready explanation: ''Sometimes localising an international campaign means a lot of the nuances and subtle humour gets lost in the process. And in order to preserve this air of subtle sexuality and an international feel that it was decided to run with the original.''

Another reason for this obsession, argues the agency, is the psyche of the Indian male. Even today Indian men tend to moralise when there are Indian models in commercials that deal with overt sexual attraction.

''Internationally, Axe is an iconic style brand best known for its unique and contemporary fragrances,'' says Viral Oza, Marketing Manager (Personal Products), Hindustan Lever Ltd. The two 10-second ads, created by BBH, London, feature a girl sticking close to an Axe user in an empty train, and a cleaning woman at a massage parlour being irresistibly drawn to massaging a customer who uses Axe. The humour may not be exactly in-your-face, but that shouldn't bother what is, at the end of the day, a niche offering.

McCann's Creative Director R. Shastry (front, in right) with his team: portraying real people

No. 9: Coca-Cola: Life Ho To Aisi

Sometimes, companies need to point out subtle shifts in advertising strategy lest they go ignored. Coca-Cola claims its celebrity-strategy has shifted from portraying them as 'special' to that of projecting them as ordinary, spontaneous, 'real' people. The objective? To build consumer empathy, and drive mass penetration and usage.

Inspired by the international ''Life is Good'' campaign, this latest offering from Coca-Cola features Bollywood's poster boy, Hrithik Roshan, strutting his stuff in exotic Jaisalmer. Ramanuj Shastry, Head of McCann's creative team, is more expansive. ''It's about two worlds meeting-the slick city-boy Hrithik and the rustic Rajasthani villagers.'' The brand, he goes on to add, bridges the gap, triggering spontaneous celebration.

In June 2001, when Coke moved its account to McCann-Erickson (from Leo Burnett) its brief to the agency was clear: make a ''human connection''. The solution didn't come immediately, but after a month-long iterative process, in which all sorts of issues, including one on the age of brand Coke in India, were raised. The result? ''It's the best Coke campaign ever, in India,'' gushes Shripad Nadkarni, Vice President (Marketing), Coca-Cola India.

Orchard's Thomas Xavier (standing centre), K. Ramamurthy (left), and Nitsh Mukherjee (right), with Toyota's Sandeep Singh: something's fishy

No. 10: Toyota Qualis: Live The Qualis Life

There's more to this campaign than just the factoid that it is the sole consumer durable one in the top 10. Its objective, says Toyota, is to position the Qualis, as not a mere MUV (Multi Utility Vehicle), a slot into which it fits very well, thank you, but as a fun car for the entire family. This was a follow up on the earlier advertising for the brand that stressed product features.

And the feel-good campaign was also targeted at reducing what jargonists tend to call 'dissonance' among the existing customers-in effect, to make them feel that they made the right choice. Says Sandeep Singh, General Manager (Marketing), Toyota Kirloskar: ''In an era of nuclear families, people still yearn to be with friends and relatives. They look forward to and cherish this coming together. Toyota's brief was to ensure that the Qualis was seen as facilitating this.'' That the campaign does to an extent-especially with the ad where the family goes fishing. Still, number 10 scores marginally below all the other members of the top 10 in the BT-NFO-MBL study across all parameters.