A Time To Reflect

charukesi July 18th, 2007

This is the best state tourism ad I have come across in a long time… most states have the same kind of ads… focus on one monument, one beach, or anything else that is believed to attract visitors… and a few obvious descriptors. Madhya Pradesh tourism this neat collage taking the viewer through the length and breadth of the state. The ad is even better heard on radio, a singsong listing of the wonders of the state…

It starts off with Til dekho, Taad dekho, Aankhen phad phad dekho, Sher ki dahad dekho, Marble ka pahad dekho, Chanderi ki saadi dekho…. goes on for a whole minute - yeh dekho woh dekho… and finally hindustan ka dil dekho - marrying geogrphy and history and culture and all the rest of it with one line. The heart of Incredible India. I love this ad.

[for larger size - click on the image on the page]

***
cross-posted on my travel blog - Itchy Feet

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charukesi May 14th, 2007

I got this on email - several people seem to have already blogged about it but here goes anyway…

I have said this before - it is suicidal for a brand to admit to ‘change’. changed, improved, better, bigger… why, were they not so good earlier? Jet Airways proudly announced its new look - new crew uniforms, new corporate colors, new partner (Sahara) with an ad campaign that read - We’ve changed

Kingfisher Airlines, louder and bigger in every way (if not actually better) put this hoarding up on top of that one - We made them change

And if you are thinking Jet was asking for it, and hey, good for Kingfisher, upstart Go went and did this…

A good slogan does not a good brand make - heck, it does not even make for a good campaign. Go for it, Go! is what I say - Go got it perfect - after all, what does Jet’s “change” mean for the consumer? And Kingfisher’s too, beyond the initial smile it evokes. The only other airline ad I can think of (in the Indian context) was Deccan’s Simplifly, a revolutionary concept at the time it was introduced. (On another note, what does any of this mean to the consumer given the sorry state of Indian airports and the “air traffic congestion” situation?)

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charukesi February 6th, 2007

There is no ho-hum hoarding of the month - yet. Instead, there is an absolutely awful TV ad (yeah, I know - I have this thing for truly terrible alliteration) - The Camlin ad for permanent markers - really permanent.

Exactly how permanent? Since I am still in a state of shock after watching this to describe it in any detail, here is agencyfaqs :

The film opens inside a hut where a man lying on his deathbed is surrounded by his wife…

The ad ends as the wife hugs him on his well-being. VO: “Camlin permanent markers. Really permanent.”

Yes, really permanent. Widowhood, breaking of bangles, erasing of sindoor… the works. In the last scene, the poor man comes back to life, else what would have been the next shot in the ad, I wonder - sati? Even “worse”, what if the poor man does not come back to life, and the bindi does not got erased? What a blow to Indian culture that would have been…

Is that the most creative idea the agency (Lowe) could come up with? Fevicol (O&M) has similar advertising - but with humour - tongue-in-cheek, momerable, clear communication of brand values… As opposed to that, what exactly does this Camlin ad say anyway? And to whom?

If the ad was in terrible taste, here is a comment on it on agencyfaqs -

1-the ad doesnt cater to the tg
2-widows wud have high expectations
3-what wud a villager do with permanent marker,paibnt his wifes bindi??;)

What are these high expectations, I wonder…?

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charukesi January 8th, 2007

Whew! the relief of knowing that…

Starting this month - ho-hum hoarding of the month. Send in your favorite hhh too for this series…

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charukesi January 7th, 2007

My parents in Chennai recently had their lives made jingalala by the two of us; we gifted them with a Tata Sky connection for the television at home which had for the last two years been showing them only remade Tamil versions of the Star soaps and Sahara TV for the sole “Yindi” programming. With CAS coming into effect early this month, the battle hots up. And that means, marketing slogans on over-drive. Thinktanks from rival companies stay up nights, puffing cigarette after cancerous cigarette, in order to develop that slogan that communicates the ultimate benefit to the consumer - this is why you should buy into our brand and not the other.

And Tata Sky has clearly cracked it - Tata Sky laga daala toh life jingalala.

I mean, how can any competitor hope to match that promise? The ultimate tv watchers’ need - to have his / her life made jingalala.

Top of the charts of what they don’t teach you at Business School- or is it what they do… Get your advertising slogan right and you are on your way to winning the marketing game. Er, what about product delivery please? Or a relevant product differentiation? Oh that - minor details. Get the slogan right first, won’t you. Does anyone even remember let there be light?

Take the FM radio war in Mumbai - there is a new FM station launched every day - ok, every month - and each of them plays the same mind-numbing hit pe hit pe hit song from the latest movies that rocked the box office in the last three years, and some which did not rock so much as disappeared without a trace. When I am driving to work, and I don’t get to listen to it’s the time to disco and where’s the party tonight through the entire stretch, I am a wreck by the time I reach - my hands are trembling and my eye has that terrible tic that sets colleagues scurrying out of my way. I find myself suddenly breaking into terrra suroooooorrr in the middle of client meetings and into giggles each time I am to say something to the client. (As an aside, why, oh why, do radio jockeys giggle so much? why do all FM stations seem to hire only the great gigglers?)

As I was saying, the same hit songs in channel after channel, as if there is an invisible hand passing around an MP3 disc with a collection of fifty bollywood hits (and misses) between them. What about programming? What about content? What about differentiation? The only channel that was truly different and interesting was Go 92.5 - that suddenly turned all Hindi one morning - Britney Spears went to sleep in a room full of saas-bahus and woke up as Ekta Kapoor - why?

Ah, there we come to the slogan again. The latest station to hit (eeps) the market, BIG FM has cracked it - their slogan goes - suno sunao life banao - listen and make others listen… and make your life. Truly an utterly unique positioning stance. Big FM - daer aaye par durust aaye.

Television went through this initially when the market which had only one DD (with its Metro and other numerous regional versions) found itself flooded with tens of channels - all with film based programming - five feature films a day, countdown shows of hit songs, trailers and the like. Of course, the scene is somewhat similar today with saas after shceming saas in all the channels, but atleast there is some programming in place. Viewers - those interested enough, that is - have the choice of tuning into a program ta a specific time on a specific channel.

Unlike FM where it really makes no difference where the dial is - unless, of course, like me, you have made a careful (albeit painful) analysis of the RJs across channels and have chosen to be loyal to the one with the lowest score on the gigglo-meter. Is anyone listening?

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charukesi October 19th, 2006

Speaking of ads that make you sick, if I did have the option of tagging outdoor ads with “this sucks”, I know where I would start… with that serial on Zee TV which ran those terrible teasers all across Mumbai and Delhi last month which said among many other appalling things - “Bete ek mannat, betiyan ek bojh” (boys are a blessing, girls a burden) and “Bete banaatey kanoon, betiyan khaana” (boys make the law, girls, food). Puke. “Bete chalaye vansh, betiyan silai machine“. Puke. [Boys carry on the generation, girls run sewing machines]

[pic courtesy : mid-day]

Various organizations in Delhi protested against this campaign and the Delhi Police ordered that these hoardings be removed. And, and, here is what Ashish Kaul, Senior Vice President at Zee Network has to say - I don’t have means to replace the hoardings overnight simply because of a protest. Yes, indeed, poor man.

But hang on, there is hope. For this is only the first part of the campaign, according to Kaul - the campaign has been conceived on what we have seen since childhood, and the second campaign brings to the fore the myth that the male child is superior than the female child. As it happens, I did see the hoardings for the second part of the campaign and they go on and on about how we were trying to say that girls are indeed superior to boys in the family and hey, the first campapign was just to get your attention so on and so forth…

And while I google furiously while writing this, I find that Star TV has a similar serial about to go on air called —- Paraaya Dhan! And that Zee and Star TV have been at loggerheads claiming to be the “originnal” beityaan people. The ad for the Star TV serial raises this socially aware, thought-provoking question - ” betiyaan apni ya paraya dhan?” (girls, our own or someone else’s wealth?) - not only are we calmly writing about women as “wealth” and property, wer are also raising a question about who this wealth belongs to?

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charukesi October 19th, 2006

Adverblog writes about this initiative in Berlin and Seoul where guerrilla “soldiers” have been tagging outdoor ads with personal evaluations delivering messages such as “this ad makes me sick”, “I like this ad”, “I find this campaign boring” etc…
. The idea, ostensibly, is to raise the level of consumer awareness about the quality of outdoor advertising in a city

So these little stickies go on those big bad hoardings across the city. And as adverblog says, tagging moves to the real world. Interesting… but where is this leading? Who is behind this, I wonder? And what impact will this have on advertisers anyway…? If negative feedback can kill an ad, most advertising we see on air and in print today would not have survivied the rigorous rounds of consumer research prior to launch! As one commentor has said there, “Most clients will just be deliriously happy and say “There’s no such thing as bad publicity - at least they think and talk about us!””

And what’s stopping competing agencies and marketing companies to get themselves a huge bunch of these stickies and get their own people to “tag” ads the way they want, depending on whether it is their own or a bitter rival’s! Or maybe someone should start doing just that - the consumer gets to have some fun atleast that way…

Which recent ads would you say “suck”?

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charukesi October 11th, 2006

I remember some offensive ads that Economic Times ran a while ago on the whole “are you talking to the right target audience” question (as someone working in a field related to marketing, I confess I sometimes find the word ‘target’ in this context quite ominous…) - While I found the ads distasteful, I had shrugged it of as “what else can I expect from a ToI publication”, The Other India and MumbaiGirl had expressed strong views on this (which I agreed with totally)…

Here is something simple and striking from Sharad Haksar on how utterly clueless the marketing game can sometimes be… [link through the always interesting and though-provoking Niti Bhan’s Perspective]

Speaking of Sharad Haksar, do you remember his controversial photograph “featuring” Coke…?

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charukesi August 14th, 2006

They’ve been seen on pregnant bellies and tattooed on foreheads. They’ve invaded bathroom stalls, cellular phones and doctors’ offices. They’ve sneaked their way into movies, TV shows, novels and even Broadway plays.

Not to mention doors of movie-hall restrooms. remember you saw it here first - even before the Baltimore Sun wrote about the new advertising age [register for free and read quickly before it vanishes - is worth the effort - if only to warn you as a consumer, about where you can next expect to find advertising]

I found this article through adverblog which gives this dire warning - Advertising is hijacking all the blank spaces. Eggs, body parts, air-sickness bags… no blank space will survive. The world has become a stage for product placement.

And here is something more to chew on - New Book Reports 37% of All Advertising Is Wasted

Hmm, I wonder why? Are they actually saying that advertisements pasted on air sickness bags and on the doors of the ladies’ at movie theatres are not working? Why do I not find that difficult to believe? And what happens to the other 33%? What is to say they are not wasted?

An in any case, I wonder what is successful advertising - I read through the paper and find that the authors are as confused as the marketers (and the advertising agencies) whose $1 billion ad spend they tracked. What is clear however, is that while on one hand, we see the increase of “unconventional” media planning, marketers elsewhere are returning to tried and tested places - like television.

Personally for me, product placements rarely work - I tend to notice the brand / ad (you never know when you will desperately need a topic for a blog post) and then firmly proceed to ignore it forever - except when I am writing blog posts about it. I am sometimes happily surprised by a nice media plan that shows me an ad when I least expect it, does it subtly and does it well. The one I remember was one of the earliest attempts I remember in Indian advertising - Zee TV was showing Sholay on some national holiday (sometime in the mid 1990s) - and in the scene Gabbar laughs his well, Gabbar laugh, and shoots high up in the air and suddenly a biscuit (yes a biscuit) pops up in front of the gun, breaks into two, and becomes Krack-Jack - and we all went, wft!

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charukesi June 24th, 2006

And then some more.

For instance, sun protection inside the ladies loo.

[another in the series of things a mobile phone camera is meant for - and I need a better one surely]

I don’t know how to break this to you gently, Hindustan Lever - or the whiz media planner who thought of yet another spot to find the “captive audience” - but I am not thinking about six signs of sun damage when I am inside the loo at the theatre (no, not even at home for that matter). [Dear media planner, here is a handy tip for you because someone seems to have misled you - Imax does not have an open air loo. Really, you must believe me when I say that there is just no exposure to the sun when I am inside]

Yes, I am sitting and staring at the door, purely for lack of anything else to stare at, at that particular moment, but not because I am thinking about what the harsh sun is doing to my skin. No, believe me.

[While on this, please do me a favour and don’t ever ask me what I was doing thinking of blogging about this then]

And perhaps, it irked all the more because I had just spent a good(?) one and half hours with Kkrish, watching him drink Bournvita, telling the little kid how Bournvita makes him strong, how his grandmother always washes the glasses with Tide before serving him with Bournvita, and how Lays chips are the ultimate word in Bournvita-time snack. And how after washing the said glasses, his grandmother places the packet of Tide on the kitchen shelf next to gleaming brass and copper tumblers just so it is always in front of her eyes. And so on.

The point is this - what is it with companies spending good monies on product placements. How does it work? If it does at all? Oh, I know you are going to tell me about about how see, I remember all the brand names. But you must remember also that I am a blogger. And a market researcher and avid advertising industry watcher to boot.

And there was not much more by way of entertainment in the movie otherwise.

And then the welcome interval. And then the fairness cream (with sun control mechanism) in the loo. Enough already.

Merchandising, sure. Free gifts and promotion, surer [I know this because I did a mini poll among friends sitting in the neighboring seats about how their kids would respond to such blatant - to me atleast - endorsement in movies and was told that kids respond better to free gifts. Smart of them and so on]. But what does product placement do for the viewer? And repeated ones at that…

[More on this coming up - wait with bated breath. And oh, go drink Bournvita while you wait]

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