A Time To Reflect

charukesi October 27th, 2005

The Science blog had carried this piece recently, HIV Mortality in India Drops with Introduction of Generic Antiretroviral Therapy. The survival rate of HIV-infected patients in India has risen in response to a 20-fold drop in the price of antiretroviral therapy (ART).

The piece ends with this very important point. Making HIV-infected people aware of affordable treatment options is an important additional step toward curbing the spread of a deadly disease in a resource-poor country. True, very true.

Mzansi Afrika reports on clinical trials on the new anti-HIV gel for women (link through global voices). From the report - the trials will begin in South Africa and Uganda this week, and then extend into Tanzania and Zambia later in the year. Similar trials are being conducted in Australia by a research group.

The report also mentions, In India as well, in Tamil Nadu, similar trials are being conducted on a product called Praneem. Praneem is essentially a microbicide. These microbicides will enable women to negotiate condom use or to abandon partners who put them at risk and would also help avoid unwanted pregnancies, according to experts. With such products coming up, women empowerment will acquire new meaning in Tamil Nadu in a few months’ time when the third phase of the clinical trials for at least three candidate microbicides will begin. The Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR), a premier research institution, is already studying a product called “Praneem”.

Anyone heard more about Praneem?

• - Public health
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charukesi October 27th, 2005

This is a refreshing take on the Neil-French-maid-crap-WPP issue. Jamie of the pictures has the issue French-fried thusly.

(click and view larger image)

Which also lets me link to this fabulous blog I discovered - words & pictures. Graham, the words in this team says this - It’s predictable, but still disappointing, that most of Neil’s critics have been female and most of his supporters male. It’s also amusing to note that many critics, having the courage of their convictions, post to blogs using their real names while the apologists invariably hide behind pseudonymous Hotmail addresses.

And ends with a sentiment many of us have expressed and agree with - Balancing work and family is something both sexes struggle with on a daily basis.

words & pictures is updated every Monday - and I cannot think of a better way to begin my Mondays.

***
That done, I must point you to my response to the comments on the earlier post. Sure, both men and women find it tough to balance family and career. But I would like to see men who have actualy given up jobs to take care of family / babies. Or even decided to go easy. In case of the women, it is a complete non win-win situation (whatever that means) - I have seen women who have got back to work after babies and stayed “committed” to work - there is a harsh judgment here too - they are selfish and aggressive and basically “unmaternal”. No, not win-win at all.

• Advertising
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charukesi October 26th, 2005

Today is Blog Quake Day, a fine blogging effort initiated by desipundit.

The best resource I can point you towards is the South Asia Quake Help blog. Reuters’ AlertNet has updated news on the relief operations and also a list of organizations to which you can contribute.

Please take the Blog Quake Day message forward. And please contribute in any way, big or small that you can to the relief efforts.

• Society & Development
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charukesi October 24th, 2005

Clearly this one is not for the straw-sipping wimps. Aamir Khan in Coke’s latest piyo sar utha ke ad. A series of images of people raising their heads, in different emotions - in prayer, in gratitude, in hope, in celebration, in joy, in relief… And Aamir Khan in the end, raising a Coke bottle to his lips, drinking with his head high up.

The ad made me sit up and take notice. Another in the series of good ads from Coke featuring Aamir Khan (although the ads have not created the kind of waves that the original thanda matlab line did, upsetting Pepsi’s Yeh pyaas hai badi). And when was the last time I saw a good ad from Pepsi…? A few initial thoughts on this ad, on the Coke Pepsi ads and on emotional appeals in advertising…

The idea - drink Coke with your head up in pride. Subtle association of the brand with other positive emotions… Never hurts a brand, although it may not help either.

The route- when all else fails, fall back on the emotional “pride in your brand” pitch. Old hat maybe, but as I said, never hurts. Pepsi has Shah Rukh saying (singing /stuttering) and doing good things for that brand; Coke drinkers, this one is for you to feel good about your choice.

I think it is a good time to introduce such a route since this is not peak season for cold drinks. The timing makes it possible for the consumer to get used to the idea, identify with the emotion and become fonder of the brand - ideally. Low risk as compared to peak summer season where the need is clearly for a tangible and relevant benefit - thanda matlab Coca Cola worked, but as the line starts getting thanda, it is now time for a change…

The message - does piyo sar utha ke have the punch that thanda matlab does…? I wonder whether the consumer does not feel foolish saying ‘my brand of sweetened carbonated drink, and I am oh, so proud of it’? I have seen that pride as an appeal works best in times of “conflict” - for instance, a cricket match we all feel compelled to prove our loyalty to our country…

The icon - Ah, Shah Rukh Khan versus Aamir Khan. The problem is, Shah Rukh stays Shah Rukh, in whatever he attempts. While Aamir becomes the character. So, any Pepsi ad I see now is just another Shah Rukh ad. Pepsi has been piggy-backing on Shah Rukh’s popularity with the young for a while now, without bothering about minor irritants like a decent creative idea.

See this : , and this : . And you’ll know what I mean.

Luckily for them, Shah Rukh remains a favourite among the target consumer group - the John Abrahams may come and go but Shah Rukh has stayed on. Aamir Khan does not compare. Is bringing in more “youth icons” such as Mona Jassi Singh and Rajyavardhan Silver Rathore going to help Coke now? Given that their iconic status is dubitable at best…

And finally, the brand - in my mind, the recent Coke ads with Aamir Khan are far superior in terms of creative ideas and just plain likeability. As compared to this, the Pepsi ads have no clear theme - Oye Bubbly what beyond a catchy jingle? Why snake charmer - we do not need yet another “India+culture” stereotype reinforcement, thank you.

Having said all that, I am forced to admit that as a brand, I like Pepsi far more - and I say this as a confirmed Cola non-drinking, market-watching person. It has to do with the kind of consistent and immensely appealing communication route that Pepsi took early on in the Cola wars in India. Pepsi understood the pulse of the younger generation and spoke to them right away in their language. Some of the most memorable lines have come from Pepsi - yahi hai right choice baby, aha! (at a time when ‘baby’ in India was still hip-speak and “cool”), yeh dil maange more (for a generation seeking to break traditional confines), nothing official about it (when Coke won sponsorship rights for the 1996 world cup)… Even when Coke had the bigger stars, including Aishwarya Rai.

Bottom line : I like the new Coke ad; it is a overflowing with feel good elements (including Aamir Khan) - but I have no hopes on what it is going to do for the brand. Coke had in thanda matlab, clear and appealing brand positioning - they need to come up with one more before the next season begins. Feel good is all very good, but it is just not enough.

• Advertising , Branding and Marketing
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charukesi October 21st, 2005

The BBC reports that advertisements for babies have been appearing on the Chinese counterpart of eBay, Eachnet.

China’s strict “one child” birth control policy, coupled with the traditional bias for male children, has led to widespread reports of child abductions, and several people have been sentenced to death for their part in smuggling rings. .

Not suprisingly, boys were advertised for 28,000 yuan ($3,450) while girls were offered for 13,000 yuan ($1,603).

The seller advertises under the user name “Chuangxinzhe Yongyuan” or “innovator forever”. What can I say?

• Children and youth
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charukesi October 21st, 2005

I might be late to this party but I just read this interview on Ad Age with Neil French, the creative chief at WPP. In the interview, French shrugs his shoulders and tries hard to dismiss his decision to quit the company as just one of theose things that happen. (Link through adrants. The Ad Age interview requires free registration to read).

Wait. Why did he quit? Because of a comment he made earlier about how some women in advertising are crap because of their inability to commit themselves 100 percent to the job due to childcare issues. Uh?

From the fascinating interview -

I’m well-known for being as outrageous as I can to make the point that I want to make. Advertising is hyperbole and I exercise hyperbole as much as I can, but I laugh when I’m doing it. You can’t storyboard a smile, as somebody said.

Oh yes, I am laughing very hard. And I am reading on and gasping for breath and laughing some more. Because he calls this issue death by blog. Of course, it’s one woman getting her knickers in a twist and writing a long diatribe on a Web site and then all the other people with nothing to do joining in. Some were on my side, some were not on my side.

Now excuse me while I stop laughing just for a few seconds and go puke, and then go search for the other women who got their knickers into a twist over this offensive piece of cluelessness. (Will link to them here as and when I find - if you know of any other sites / blogs which have written about this, please let me know. Incidentally French is the advertising world’s “person with the most awards”.)

Read : Female like me, the excellent piece on this by Nancy Vonk, Co-Chief Creative Officer, Ogilvy Toronto. Neil did us the favor of voicing a widely held view, albeit an extreme version. It’s an opportunity for us all—men, too—to confront something every bit as wrong and unacceptable as racism. (Replace every comment Neil made about women with the word ‘black’ and take my point). Go read the entire post. And if you are interested, do read the comments too, they are as interesting and revealing as the post itself.

And the media reports : Economic Times grandly announces He spoke about women & lost his job - in which case, I am surprised any of us is still holding a job…

The Telegraph says it straight - Advertising chief loses job over French maid and sexist insults.
Pity they didn’t think of French loses job over French maid.

• Advertising
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charukesi October 19th, 2005

BusinessWeek’s Blogspotting asks Does Wikipedia need editors and points to a post on Nicholas Carr’s blog. The law of the wiki is an interesting dicsussion on the idea of ‘quality’ on wikipedia. Here he suggests that posts on arcane topics are better than those on general topics, since only people with some specialized knowledge and interest contribute to the former while any individual with a mouse in hand can add his ‘two cents’ worth to the latter. While this sounds plausible, I find that I refer to wikipedia only for information on the general / broader topics - more as a quick reference source rather than a reliable one. Even in case of topics requiring specialized knowledge, I have no way of knowing who - and with what level of expertise - contributed to the article.

In other words, the example of Wikipedia actually undercuts, rather than supports, the Web 2.0 tenet of “collective intelligence.” It reveals that collectivism and intelligence are actually inversely correlated. Leading to what he calls the “collective mediocrity trap”.

Apart from just mediocre or plain inferior information, wikipedia presents the opportunity for another quality issue - that of information / knowledge that is selective and manipulative in nature (even given that all knowledge is selective and can be used to manipulate!). Where does information stop and propaganda begin? There are all kinds of nuts out there brimming with their pet ideas on their preferred politics, religion, cause…

As information becomes more and more open and across the internet, the need for control mechanisms become sharper. Personally for me, the idea of such a huge information source created, totally depending on the responsible and mature behavior of millions of end users, is amazing. As a completely democratic source of information, is wikipedia a viable model in its present form?

Says Carr, If Wikipedia wants to achieve it’s goal of being “authoritative,” I think it will have to abandon its current structure, admit that “collective intelligence” makes a pretty buzzphrase but a poor organizational model, and define and impose some kind of hierarchical power structure. In which case, it does not remain a wiki… A rather dramatic dilemma - democracy without accountability or control with quality?

• Technology
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charukesi October 17th, 2005

This is a test post. Having problems posting / adding comments. Please check this and let me know.

Update: This post works fine, so do all others except the earlier one on the gender ratio. Maybe some setting went wrong in that? In any case, if you have any thoughts on that one, please leave them here. Thanks!

Further update : I started this as a test post since there was some problem with the blog. there are a couple of comments to the earlier post on the declining sex ratio that suggested to me that I had not made myself clear there. So am continuing the post here.

I am not for a minute expressing surprise at the abysmally low sex ratio in the country. I have been writing about this regularly. What I was startled to discover was that rural India as compared to urban India has a better sex ratio - which turns on its head all the logic I have heard about rural poverty and therefore people (poor and living in villages) practise female infanticide more frequently.

Look at this data again :

Sex ratio (no. of females per 1000 males) : Rural 957 compared to Urban 932.

I was wondering about this and not about the skewed sex ratio in general. (Rural as defined by the census report as having a population of less than 5000, and where atleast 70% of male adults are engaged in non agricultural occupations and so on).

Furthest update : I discovered - my server host, i.e. - that the earlier post includes a ‘taboo’ (for my blog’s mean sharp spam filter) word in its title - sex - and therefore the blog was going into paroxysms and refusing to let me edit / comment. All set right now. Glad to know this blog stays clean despite all the temptation out there. Remind me to use ‘gender’ next time.

Also glad that noone can accuse me of such things after reading the post. Noone, not even certain people from certain organizations for whom it is all about shaving the Indian family. Oh, did I say shaving? I mean shaming, of course.

And Aparna follows this up with her own news-limerick

• Pot-pourri
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charukesi October 17th, 2005

Just read Harini’s post on the 60 million missing children - how to name it? Readying myself for the enlightening and amusing comments containing the “ist” words - activist and feminist - I urge you to head there right now and read it. (And no, don’t even bother mentioning Hepatitis to me).

And just today, I came across this intriguing statistic on the difference in sex ratio between urban and rural India. (It is part of a larger research on “Household Consumer Expenditure
and Employment-Unemployment Situation in India” conducted by the National Sample Survey Organisation - 2003 data).

Here it is.

Sex ratio (no. of females per 1000 males)
Rural 957 Urban 932

Sex ratio among adults
Rural 982 Urban 930

Sex ratio among children
Rural 915 Urban 939

Given the deplorable situation, overall rural India has a better sex ratio.
The sex ratio among adults (defined as persons aged 14 and more) is much better in rural India - which to me, is startling data
Among children, rural India seems worse off, but the gap is still not as large as in the case of adults.

Does this mean that female infanticide in rural areas is a newer phenomenon as compared to urban? There must be some explanation for this which eludes me now… I need to think about this a lot more before I begin to understand what is happening… What are your thoughts?

***
(There seems to be some problem adding comments to this post. Please email / leave your comment on the next post which is blank - that was a test to see if there is a problem with the blog or just this post).

• Indiawatch , - Gender issues
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charukesi October 17th, 2005

In the previous post about the nature of advertising in high involvement product categories, education figured as a lucrative business area. I discussed briefly the areas of English coaching and higher education (as represented by the numerous private MBA institutes and dental colleges and engineering college all over the country). Exciting promises of a bright future. In exchange for a king’s ransom as fees. Which people were willing to pay - in anticipation of even part fulfilment of their dreams and aspirations - as conveyed in the advertising for such “products”.

Another money making business in the sphere of education which is discussed here is computer training. What lies behind the phenomenal success of computer training centres that have mushroomed across large and small towns in India in the last decad? Clearly, the key reason is that of a tangible benefit - a job at the end of the course. An advantage that “vocational” training has over conventional college education. These training centres started small, diffidently offering courses that supplemented formal education. And soon caught on to the fact that people were willing to accept such training as substitutes instead. From certificate / diploma courses offered in return for a few weeks / months of classes, soon there were degrees being ofered, for courses extending over a few years. If as a conventional graduate, you had no perceived value in the job market, as a graduate from the ‘premier computer training centres’ of the day, you landed straight from your desk at the class to a desk at a “multinational company”.

Apart from this, there is another reason for the roaring success of such centres. Especially in small town India which made as much money for this business as the large towns. A new dimension to social mobility that conventional sociology has not taken much notice of.

These centers offered young men and women an opportunity and place to meet other young men and women in public. In a society that was otherwise traditional and constricting, such classes offered legitimate and even parentally approved meeting grounds for the young with romantic notions. Or just the young wanting to ‘break free’ - in more ways than one.

I discovered this dimension quite by accident while an acquaintance mentioned to me that he had met his wife at NIIT; there were four other couples from his batch alone. “I got the feeling that some of them came there only for that purpose“.

Think about the number of times you have noticed groups of young people hanging out in front of computer centres - at all times of the day. I am not suggesting that this was the only reason for the popularity of such courses. I see this as a bonus that a lot of young people in the last decade or so discovered. Get an ‘education’ that is job-oriented, and along the way, if you happen to meet and like someone, then all the better. And your parents are paying for all this too… (so what if they, with dreams of their children’s brilliant future, went bankrupt in the process…)

• Children and youth , - Education
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