The year 2008 witnessed remarkable growth in the Indian direct-to-home television services market. At the same time, increase in the number of players made the situation more competitive. This led to the adoption of unconventional advertising strategies to attract and retain customers. Reliance ADAG's Big TV made a sequel to the teaser ad campaign of Airtel's Digital TV, which made it look as through Digital TV's teaser advertisements actually came from Big TV. Digital TV's advertisements had not carried any information about the brand and product; and moreover, the brand color of both the players was red. These aspects prompted Big TV to mimic Digital TV's teaser ads and take the opportunity to promote its own brand of direct-to-home television services. Big TV's ad hijack posed a set back to the effectiveness of Digital TV's pre-launch campaign. Nonetheless, Digital came up with a powerful post-launch campaign, which helped in strong positioning of its brand and services. However, the tactics played by Reliance's Big TV prompted a debate among advertising analysts. Was it ethical on the part of Reliance to hijack the competitor's teaser campaign? Would this have a negative impact on Reliance's brand equity and business? Or was it a smart and prudent move and should it be commended as good advertising strategy? How would this incident influence the future of teaser ad campaigns in India?

On October 8, 2008, The Times of India reported that Reliance ADAG's Big TV (BTV) mimicked Bharti Airtel Digital TV's (DTV) pre-launch teaser advertisement and released a strikingly similar teaser ad to promote BTV's Direct-to-Home (DTH) service. In the late-2000s, the DTH market in India was budding as an alternative to cable television services. With increased number of players in the DTH segment, there was growing competition to capture the market by being cost competitive. And advertising became a catalyst to grab customers' eyeballs. Reliance and Bharti Airtel, the prominent rivals in the telecommunications industry, had drawn battle lines in the DTH segment also. BTV ran a television commercial by hijacking DTV's teaser advertisement (Ad), thereby taking advantage of the curiosity created among viewers by DTV. To grab viewers' attention and for better market positioning of BTV, Reliance took the cream out of DTV's campaign, leaving the viewers confused and thinking that the teaser ad belonged to BTV. This act also raised doubts regarding the ethics in the minds of analysts.

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