Magicpin breaks the trend with a backfire at The Trending CRED Ad

CRED is an Indian fintech startup and unicorn, based out of Bangalore, Karnataka, which was founded in 2018. CRED’s main feature is allowing users to make credit card payments through its app for which they get rewarded.

Cred always comes up with quirky and witty advertisements which make the audience remember it for a longer period of time. A latest CRED advertisement showed Rahul Dravid in an unimaginable avatar, losing his calm while stuck in a traffic jam in Bengaluru. The ad obviously went viral and several other brands used the catchphrase: Indiranagar ka gunda hoon main in their social media posts.

Offline discovery and rewards platform Magicpin, owned by Samast Technologies, latest ad, featuring actor Vijay Raaz, is a clever spoof of CRED’s viral celebrity campaign.

Magicpin takes on CRED’s rewards programme, which gives “Cred coins” to users paying their credit card bills via the platform. The insight that drove the ad was that most CRED users have lakhs of points, but don’t seem to know how or where to redeem them.

In the ad, “Bread”, the parodied version of CRED, is accused of distracting customers with its “quirky” brand communications as they tend to worry about how to use the “coins” they have accumulated as rewards points. The Magicpin ad is evidently a copy of CRED when it comes to execution and set design.

Magicpin, with a user base of five million, has played on this insight to take a dig at CRED and contrasted it with its own rewards programme, which the brand says has a wider range of options for their users to expend points—food (including dining out and home delivery), fashion, grocery, and e-commerce platforms.

The ad film has already garnered 2.7 million YouTube views since 16 April. Magicpin’s core value proposition is rewards and savings for its consumers and growth for its retailer partners.

“When we saw the very successful campaign by another brand highlighting ‘cashback and rewards’ as their core message, we knew that this was something on which we have a massive edge. The proof of this is the success of the campaign itself, just on the first day, we’ve been seen by millions of people and our search traffic has gone up by 5X,” said Anshoo Sharma, co-founder and chief executive officer, Magicpin. Unlike some fintech companies where rewards were a marketing activity, for Magicpin, it was deeply embedded into the core value proposition of matching users and partners.

What are your thoughts on such types of advertisements? Do you think Magicpin played a good move?  Let us know your thoughts in the comments down below.