Ad of the Day: Taj Mahal Tea wins Guinness World Record for rain-activated music billboard

‘Megh Santoor’ measures 150 feet wide and was installed outside of the Vijayawada train station in Andhra Pradesh, India for monsoon season, which typically lasts from June to September. With every rain shower, the raindrops activate the billboard’s strings to perform a rendition of the ‘Raag Megh Malhar,’ a classical Indian form of music played on a stringed instrument, called a santoor, that celebrates rainfall.

The tea brand obtained the Guinness World Record on September 10 and created a spot heralding the win earlier this month. Today, October 16, marks the last day the installation remains outside of the Vijayawada Railway Station until today, as monsoon season is expected to end.

• Anatomy of an Ad: How Unilever turned rain into song for its Taj Mahal tea brand in India

The out-of-home campaign was created in partnership with the creative agency Ogilvy India.

“We’re extremely proud of the Megh Santoor piece. It has taken months of planning, testing and failing, before we finally succeeded in making this happen. Taj and Indian classical music have been each other’s companions for very long now,” commented Kainaz Karmakar and Harshad Rajadhyaksha, co-chief creative officers at Ogilvy India. “We added rain to it for this experiment. We call it an experiment because it was filled with ‘what ifs’, with no guarantee of result until the day it rained, and the drops hit the keys and created music.”

Credits

Creative agency: Ogilvy

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