Sunil Gupta
Blog

AD Nauseam: Part - XIV

Lots of small stuff, almost en passant this time, folks.

One index on which I'm pretty sure that we Indians and India will rival the position we've attained and maintained on the Corruption Index is the Good Taste Index, should anyone have the good sense to start it.

Just one example should suffice. The current TVC's run on ESPN-Star lampooning the England cricket team are so breathtakingly lowbrow that they would make the stuff we see in the Laughter Challenge TV shows (should be called Laughter Challenged, really, but I digress) seem like Shakespeare.

Oh, yes, I suppose the guys who thought (loosely meant) them up and the client who rolled laughing all the way down the aisles of putrid humour thought (ditto) that they were just the stuff to give the troops who're down in the FDI, Aam Aadmi and Didi dumps. And so they've come up with the "Band Bajana" routine (with a family actually bajaoing the band, just in case you didn't get the pun), as in taking the mickey out of the opponents. Perhaps not as puerile as the "Naani yaad karaa denge" stuff old Rajiv G gave us while he was in his cups, but living dangerously close. At least the RG stuff was over 20 years ago…why in God's name are we getting the same type of drivel in 2012?

Perhaps we deserve it, actually. Because the Englishmen have demonstrated in Bombay (oops, sorry, Mumbai, before 66A arrives at my door) by what they did to our pathetic little cricket team is not only that they can do the same and better, but they can even start the word with a G instead.

Touche!

And so what else is new, me hearties?

Well, it should be me honey bunnies, I guess, with the latest Idea idea jingling the airwaves in quite a nice way, in that it's almost music to one's ears what with the cacophony of the Band Baaja Barattis above. Not quite sure what the done-to-death Kashmir to Kanyakumari routine is supposed to add, though (and why, oh why, don't they get away from stereotypes for once? The shikara man, the elephant & the mahout, the Zouth Indian girl is a Zouthie accent, the Pnjabi in pnjabi, ad nauseam??? Why couldn't they do the Zouthie girl speaking in Pnjabi accent, I say, mind it? Would the whole hunny bunny edifice have crumbled? Our fun in India comes in small doses, or should I say dozes?).

Anyway, no doubt all shall be revealed, and maybe the shikara chappie will turn out to be Bertie Wooster, or maybe not, but I wonder why the tune reminds me suspiciously of a song called "Honey Bunch" sung by the Four Knights many moons ago?

One feature of many of our ads that's struck me with all the force of lift doors closing before I can get in is how many of them are set in lifts. Seagram's (very nice one, by the way, the chappie acting really well and exemplifying exactly what we chappies do if we're ever closeted in a lift with an attractive member of the opposite species), SBI, Vodafone, Tata Sky Plus, Chlormint to name a few, and now the latest salvo from Tata Docomo as a part of its series "Hate incomplete stories" in which the loutish chappie's stuck in a lift with a cute young thing. Superb acting by chappie, thus once again showing that you don't need celebs to make a point, though the ending's quite routine.

So why lifts? My guess is that it tightens the frame and the narrative framework…and helps keep the story on track by limiting the options of what can be done. Certainly most of the ones above and many international ones (Wonderbra, Whiskas) are crisp examples of what good ads can be.

One irritant that never fails to get my goat is a typo in an ad or in a newspaper. The latest one that –literally got said goat was an article in the latest Sunday Times which was highlighting the fact that many international airlines now feature Indian items on their menus and mentioned the names of a few dishes. All very well till I cam to this gem: "palak ghost". Hmm. One way of them ghosties getting their greens, what?!

The ad of the month? Indubitably the one from the Hindu newspaper: "Behave. Young India is watching". How true. Now if only young India would behave, too. Alas.

And finally, what does one make of the branding strategy of Arvind Kejriwal (more power to him, say I)? The Aam Aadmi branding is a coup, marketing warfare at its best and strategically so very sound that it should be featured in the treatises of the Kotlers and Trouts of this world. Not only has it taken the wind out of the sails of the GOP, but it also succinctly sums up both its core constituency and its core promise. What more can one ask?

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