A Bengaluru-based start-up, Swish, came up with an innovative marketing strategy which amused some while drew criticism from others. The marketing campaign carried out in a format of human ads, involved men walking on the city streets carrying illuminated advertisement boards promoting the ten-minute delivery app in Bengaluru.
The photo of the men walking with the advertisement boards on their back went viral after an X user in a post joked about the marketing strategy, captioning the picture: “VC : how much funding do you need ? Startup: $5 million, VC : what's your customer acquisition plan, Them : Human ads, VC : Take my money.”
Netizens React:
One of the social media users commented on the post, “This sucks. I would do it differently and not use human mules.” Meanwhile another opined, “This one was good. And here we are banging our heads on how to go for profitability. Difficult to fight with market forces.”
“Maybe it’s just me, but human ads make me so sad, they’re walking around with that heavy thing on their backs for god knows how long,” one user wrote.
Many pointed out that this form of advertising has been used by many companies previously.
One person even admitted that she might want to do it and asked for payment specifications. “Lowkey feels like I could do it . How much is the hourly rate? What do I have to do?. Just walk? Could be a part time gig,” DevNa wrote.
A user guessed that the pay won’t be much and could be around Rs 1,000 per day.
“I remember swiggy doing the same on traffic signals some 10 years back!! And there's always merit in trying new media channels.. The only pit is the user feeling enough of a hook to search this on mobile and give it a try,” one wrote.
