People create their own personalities via social media: Aditi Shrivastava

Conversations around one’s fashion choices always see battle lines being drawn across households. What’s fashion for the young is a cause for bewilderment for their parents. FilterCopy, the mixed media offering from digital entertainment company Pocket Aces, brought out the ghar, ghar ki fashion clashes in a humour-laced video, titled ‘Fashion Conversations With Mom’. 

The video, featuring veteran actress Sheeba Chaddha and Aisha Ahmed, was released on the occasion of Mother’s Day this year, however, the situations shown in the almost 4 minutes long film are ones that any Indian mother and her daughter would identify with. Our mothers will always love dressing us up, no matter how old we get. While she is the closest confidante we can ever have in our lives, our fashion choices seldom match. Titled ‘Fashion Conversations With Mom’, the video is a hilarious take on every fashion conversation anyone has ever had with their mom. The video has garnered well over 24 million views on YouTube so far. 

Aditi Shrivastava, Co-Founder, Sales and Brand Solutions, Pocket Aces, recounted, “This Mother’s Day, we wanted to do something different which captured the relationship that we have with our parents and mothers in particular.” She added that the agency is working with Lifestyle on more videos. 

How it all began 

Elaborating on the conceptualisation of the campaign, Shrivastava said, “Amidst lots of love, we have our tussles with moms over getting married, studying or the torn denim jeans. Fashion is one of the biggest topics for tussles. Young people feel that they are so much more fashionable than their moms, but moms are also always so much elegant and they have a different kind of fashion sense which makes them pretty in their own way. We then thought that such content would be very relatable and great to tap into. Every girl has had such conversations with their mom and this works with Ayesha a lot as she is one of our big stars at FilterCopy and has been in some of our biggest videos. Ayesha and Sheeba have had amazing chemistry in the past when we shot for Furlenco furniture.” 

From brief to video 

Lifestyle’s brief was to create a campaign that was relatable for their young TG – girls in the age group of 16 to 21 – especially for their youth-focussed brand Ginger. 

Shrivastava explained, “A lot of people in this TG stay with their parents, and we had to capture those sentiments while one is interacting with their mom on a daily basis. We built our content around that.” 

Speaking on Ginger, she said that the brand is all about cutting edge fashion for young people which is affordable. “We have tried our best to portray that in the video, while at the same time give a humourous twist to mother-daughter relationship,” she added. 

Aisha Ahmed

Aisha Ahmed chipped in here, saying, “I never used to shop much at Lifestyle. Everything they asked me to wear for the video shoot was really cool and also quite affordable. You would usually end up spending a lot on such stuff at other stores. For my birthday, which was a few days after we shot the video, I went to the Lifestyle store and bought the garment that I actually wore in the video.” 

The viral factor 

There is science behind all the madness – the viral madness. There is a creative team that has a method. Shrivastava elucidated that what FilterCopy’s content tries to display is very relatable to the people. So there is a particular section of the audience that the company makes the video for and in this case it is mothers and daughters. When people see it, they can relate to how they have come across the same things in life, which makes them share the video, and when there are enough people viewing and sharing it, the video has the potential to go viral. 

“The entire video’s reach has been completely organic. There are multiple numbers of things that create virality. Relatability plays an important role, emotion can also create virality, and so does sense of humour, where you want to show it to friends and other people. It needs to look smart, for instance, if I read a very smart article I want to share it with my friends. People are creating a personality about themselves through social media. We create content that help people express themselves and create that personality. ‘Why will people hit the share button?’ is a question that we think about whenever we make content,” she said. 

The Ginger Girl and the Cool Mom 

Speaking about the two actors who play the role of the mom (Sheeba Chaddha) and daughter (Aisha Ahmed) Shrivastava said, “Sheeba and Aisha have worked with Pocket Aces’ FilterCopy before and they have an amazing chemistry. Not just FilterCopy, but Aisha has also worked with many other creators of digital videos. She fits very well in that age bracket of our audience.” 

“The Ginger Girl is supposed to be a very funky girl and hence, we had to make sure that the hair, makeup and everything else was right. There is a lot of content that we create for brands and also a lot of it without brands,” Shrivastava added. 

Sheeba Chaddha

Sheeba Chaddha, who has been part of the acting world for several years now, has worked with FilterCopy for a couple of more video content. She is no stranger to the digital world, having been associated with TVF and AIB before. “It’s always great working with them. The content is fun and different. Also, I am currently working with AIB for something,” Chaddha informed. 

Variety is the spice of content 

FilterCopy is Pocket Aces’ biggest channel, with all the sharable and snackable content in the form of short videos, gifs, memes, etc. Dice Media has all the premium web series content, while Gobble is everything to do with food. The companyis creating content across these three channels. This year it will be releasing four web series on Dice Media and also the second season of ‘Little Things’, which they released last year. Shrivastava informed, “On FilterCopy, you are going to see a video every single week and a lot of articles daily. On Gobble, we have a video every day, as well as ‘The Great Gobbler’, which is a food eating competition. There is this whole content that we make that people love to watch whenever they feel like.”

Brand benefits 

“We understand what kind of results the brands that we partner with are looking for. We have delivered results in terms of store traffic, website traffic and other things which depend upon the goals of the brand. Different brands have different goals and so we try to capture the mindset of the audience that we are reaching out to. We then reply to people’s comments and try to direct them to lifestylestores.com and interact with them. We are thus pushing the audience in a very friendly way to go and check out the stuff and then getting their reaction towards the brand,” explained Shrivastava. 

A lot of marketing goes behind the video with memes, clips and gifs. The company does it on Instagram, a lot of interaction happens on Twitter, besides there is also a WhatsApp distribution system. The real numbers are then measured by the brand and then they share the data, which helps the company to learn and make it more effective for every subsequent campaign that they do. 

As a millennial, Ahmed feels social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram are shaping the future of digital media. According to her, Instagram has been most helpful for every actor to put up their profile. “Every actor has a platform now, as against earlier, when there were so many conditions and no ease. There is so much equalisation for actors and that really brings out the best in them. Web content or social media has made life a lot easier,” Ahmed noted. 

Expressing her thoughts on social media trends, Chaddha said, “The content that one can see here is great. Breaking down barriers of what is considered acceptable by the market and only that content must be pushed, all such has become myth. Also, there is a lot more scope for actors in the digital industry, apart from the television industry. Actors can also become content producers. Small videos can get a lot of reach and become sensational, which makes it more encouraging and exciting.” She firmly believes that there is a lot of scope in digital for everybody. 

When asked about how different is it working in a short film/ video from a feature film, Chaddha remarked that they are both quite different and come with their own set of challenges and have their own perks. “Short films are just short & sweet and fast. It takes comparatively lesser time to shoot. But be it a short film or a feature film, I enjoy working in both,” she concluded.