Care Hospitals opened one of their biggest branches in Gachibowli, Hyderabad a few months back. In the midst of hundreds of ads and billboards put up by Care Hospitals all over Hyderabad, I was alarmed to see the below billboard put up by a competitor, right next to the new Care Hospitals campus.
Continental Hospitals had taken a brazen approach to rent out a prominent billboard right next to the location and has put in this tongue-in-cheek hoarding. This is unmissable for anyone taking the highway, and is all the more prominent in the night, with use of right brand colors of 'Care Hospitals' just as seen in the neon lights right behind the billboard! A classic case of ambush marketing at its unsavory best!
Hardly a few weeks later, I stumbled upon this billboard by Oakridge International school, again in the Hitech city area in Hyderabad.
I saw variants of this board in other places where ‘Pilani -or- Princeton’ was replaced by ‘Symbiosis -or- Stanford’. Seems to be a case of an 'International' school glorifying Ivy league universities abroad, while belittling their Indian ones with a similar rhyme to the name. I wonder whether they’ve also used a ‘IIT -or- MIT’ comparison somewhere!
Clearly another variant of ambush marketing that could degenerate into an ugly spat. When I googled for these, I couldn’t find any local news or mentions, and I wonder how the affected parties have reacted to these.
But if the intent of these boards was to grab attention and be talked about, they sure achieved their 'intended' purpose.
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