Advertising Blues
Posted on 30 Apr 2006 under Rants
I’ve been meaning to write a post about this for quite some time. I think about it every time I see these ads on TV, which leads to thoughts about the lack of creativity in the film industry. So, right into it then…
Let’s begin with some “mindblasting”… what in the world were the admakers of the Aveo ad thinking? The ad gets reduced to a 30-second long motion picture of 4 words … “wow fanstastic mindblowing mindblasting” The first 3 words, while signifying a lack of ideas, are yet OK… however, “mindblasting”? What’s the car going to do? Plant C4 in your brain?
Even more disastrous is the Pepsi TV ad. Shah Rukh Khan gets reduced to a mentally retarted (in my opinion, that’s how he looked in the ad anyway) man with the brain of a 4 year old who gets excited about a soft-drink-cum-TV-channel company that gets supermodels and highly paid TV actresses to deliver their goods home to their customers. Oh, and in the end, he solves a super-mystery “…to use Pepsi TV kehte hai” He’s flanked by 3 more idiots whose roles I couldn’t easily decipher. But the ad’s message was clear… no matter what crap you’re watching on TV, you’ll enjoy it if you’re drinking Pepsi! Fantastic message! Pepsi have now proven that drinking their soft-drinks makes people so mentally numb and backward that you enjoy saas-bahu dramas… “Nahee Ansh! Is Pepsi ke bottle par goli main ne nahi chalaee”
But well, one must also point out some good stuff on the TV… as it is, this kind of stuff is really rare. The naukri.com ads are just excellent… all of them. So are/were the IBM thinkpad ads. Now, these ads are worth celebrating. I even remember some print media ads that were truly awesome… most of which are the Times Of India ads… 2 were based on word-play…
1. This was then they were using the tag “One nation, one newspaper”… the ad was a giant billboard with something like this :
DIWALI
RAMZAN
Who are we to divide?
2. They ran this ad on a giant billboard when they reduced the price of the Tuesday and Thursday editions to only 1/-:
Priceless
TOI now only for Re.1/- on Tuesdays and Thursdays.
I do agree with you. But thats not the case only in India. Some of the ads in the US are worse than those in India. But on the other hand some are really really good.
One ad that i really liked was the Pentium 4 Ad which 3 or 4 guys in all blue doing some stuff. Like a wall of light bulbs and sucking them in with a vacuum.
Anyways hope you dont mind me adding your blog to my blogrole.
i gotta admit that reading this did put a smile on my face… some of teh adverts on tv are ridiculous, i havent seen the pepsi advert ur referring to but it surely does sound funny!! however some adverts are genious… i dunno if u have seen a couple of the honda adverts, u just wonder how they did that!!!
in england there is a program which shows hilarious adverts from all over the world… its quite entertaining!!!
[...]Vista, Windows Vista. The “wow” starts now, apparently. No, I’m not going to review Vista (I’m quite happy with my 512MB RAM Windows XP, and don’t plan on upgrading for a while, thank you very much). But if you’re a regular reader of my blog, you’ve probably read a previous entry on bad advertising, and now you can probably guess what this is post is about
. [...]
I live in the United States and cant say that I’ve seen the Pepsi commercial that you are talking about. I do agree with you on your comment about lack of creativity in the film industry. For every good movie or commercial there tons that bomb.