Bus
Fevicol2002
Bus is a 2002 television commercial for Fevicol, created by Ogilvy & Mather India (Mumbai).
The line
Fevicol: The Ultimate Adhesive
Why it works
A battered bus lurches across the Rajasthan desert so overloaded that villagers cling to every side and crowd the roof, swaying in eerie unison over each bump, yet nobody falls. The answer waits for the last shot: a small sign on the back reading "Fevicol: The Ultimate Adhesive." Ogilvy had a print ad of a jammed train; director Prasoon Pandey spent weeks doubting it could become a film until he saw the trick was to withhold the answer, revealing the scene slowly, like cards turned one at a time. He moved the shoot from Mumbai's Film City to dunes near Jaisalmer, cast more than 200 villagers and dug alternating trenches so the bus would rock instead of hop. It won a Silver Lion at Cannes in 2002, which Storyboard18 records as the first Lion for an Indian film in six years. It is studied as the distilled Fevicol method of Ogilvy and the Pandey brothers: rural Indian life, absurd exaggeration, the brand held back as the punchline.
Techniques
- Humour Withholds the brand until the final shot, letting an absurdly overloaded bus swaying across the desert build to a comic reveal.
- Demonstration Villagers clinging to every side of the lurching bus never fall off, an exaggerated visual proof of the adhesive's holding power.
Sources · 4
Updated
