Ad Nauseam : Part - VI

Tell me you missed me!

Had to take some time off to work (ha), and now that work and I have decided to work part-time (ha ha), here am I again with my whimsies about the magical wonderland of Indian advertising.

And what's struck me the most about what I've witnessed in the past few months is that it's all a game of numbers now. I'm all for validation, for specific promises and putting your mouth where your money is, but some of the numbers we're seeing (and claims being made) are so crazy that I'm ready to believe even the political manifestoes.

Take One: Almost as an aperitif, the TVC for Fogg (used first by Phineas Fogg of Jules Verne fame, no doubt) deodorant strikes you hard in the armpit.

800 sprays, it promises. Wonderful.

But precious little else.

One wonders how one actually measures this stuff and immediate questions spring to mind.

How long should each spray be to get 800?

How do we keep track?

What if we get only 799?

How will we be able to prove it and get redress? Shall we have a spray competition in the supermarket?

And if we get 801, will they ask for a service charge?

And so on.

On second thoughts, the name's a good one.

I am completely befogged.

Take Two: More serious stuff than BO now. The latest TVC's for Kotak Bank promising 6 per cent interest on savings accounts. "Don't think of it as 2 per cent more" he says, "think of it as 50 per cent yeggstra!" All vairy nize, as Vinay Pathak in his Zouthie accent would say.

But there's the rub too.

What they don't tell you, even in the fine print or the quick ending gabble on the TVC's is that you have to have a minimum balance of Rs 1 lakh in the account to get your goodies.

And how many of the many-headed would keep that amount in their savings accounts, eh?

Sometimes I wonder just how gullible the advertisers and their agencies think we are.

But that wonderment lasts about the length of a Fogg spray…

Very gullible, is the answer.

It's like the promises by the telecom chappies…3 gadzillion sms free if you take this package: who really keeps track? Can you prove it? Can you decode your telecom bills? Do you understand the Theory of Relativity?

Which leads me nicely to the basic point: what is ASCI doing to prevent these sins of omission and commission?

But all the above fades into insignificance and it's time to get them off their you-know-whats because the most egregious claims of them all are those made by the Income Tax and Service Tax departments when ask us to pay our taxes in time so that they can use our taxes to build the nation!

Ha. No, HA!

If ever there's a game of numbers that's so loaded in favour of the advertiser, it's this hokum. We're talking tens of thousands of crores here, and what do we have in return?

You know the numbers, don't you? The highest infant mortality, the lowest sanitation quotient, impregnable poverty, lower than even Bangladesh in the Human

Development Index…roads and electricity that astonish us with their lack of being, one third of our MP's with criminal cases and MLA's whose net worth increases exponentially in the blink of an election term, and a corruption index that's perhaps the only thing that we're tops in.

Talk about fooling all the people all the time.

Now, that's a big number that no one can dispute!