Zomato is an Indian restaurant search and discovery service founded in 2008 by Deepinder Goyal and Pankaj Chaddah. It currently operates in 23 countries, including Australia, and United States. Zomato, Indian restaurant search platform is known for their creative ad campaigns, but this time the brand is in trouble. While the campaign tried to show off their tongue in the cheek humor, the brand later had to apologise. Their creative hoardings which were up everywhere in Delhi and NRC area garnered a lot of social media’s attention. It garnered both positive and negative views but was largely slammed by social media users.
Following which, Zomato Co Founder, Pankaj Chaddah tweeted saying, “Hey, while we didn’t mean to, we can see why it can be offensive to people, and we apologize for it. We will take this ad down with immediate effect.”The ad hoardings include Bollywood puns and witty pop culture references that are turning heads as many social media users took to Twitter to share every ad they spotted in their city.
This is the first big ad campaign of Zomato since 2015 when it came out with an innovative marketing approach of running their ads on porn websites, which consequently attracted a lot of eyeballs and millions of clicks. people spotted them and complemented the brand for the clever use of the words and the medium.
Their latest ad campaign comes after it launched its food delivery service through the acquisition of food delivery start-up Runnr in September. The campaign by Zomato also comes at a time when the company has been facing stiff competition from Swiggy’s and Uber eats in the food ordering, restaurant curation and delivery service space.
MC.BC. (mac n’ cheese, butter chicken), Acche Din are finally here, Bol Baby Bol, Malai Tikka Roll!, Oonchi Hal Building? Lift Teri Band Hai? These were some of the lines that you may have come across plastered in bold on hoardings all over in cities such as Delhi, Mumbai, Bengaluru and others.
