Karthik S | beastoftraal.com

Women’s Day 2023: Ford vs. Mercedes

March 16, 2023March 16, 2023 by Karthik S

Two Women’s Day 2023 campaigns by automobile companies that stood out for me, for vastly different reasons: Ford and Mercedes. Ford’s campaign, by the agency VMLY&R, was something of a crowd favorite, given the number of people I noticed sharing it on…

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Hakka noodles, shipping costs, and life insurance to the rescue

March 13, 2023March 13, 2023 by Karthik S

In November 2022, Pirate Ship, the cloud-based shipping software provider for small and medium-sized businesses, launched its first brand campaign made by the agency Mother. The narrative device is hilarious and audacious: People are shown to be in life-threatening distress (being abducted…

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Toothbrush, toothpaste… but rinse?

March 10, 2023March 10, 2023 by Karthik S

In my 4 decades of existence on this planet, the very first time I came across the instruction that ‘one should never rinse the mouth with water immediately after brushing the teeth’ was 2 weeks ago! I stumbled on a tweet from…

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Disclosing the use of ChatGPT in your writing – should you?

March 6, 2023March 6, 2023 by Karthik S

The office of Equity, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) at Vanderbilt’s Peabody College of Education last week issued a statement addressing the recent mass shooting at Michigan State University where a 43-year-old gunman shot students at random that killed three students and injured…

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HDFC Life’s ‘The Missing Dulha’ ad campaign has an ingenious idea!

March 1, 2023March 1, 2023 by Karthik S

Update: Tata Sky did the same back in 2015, in a series of 13 interconnected ad films based on the same story, plot, and protagonists. Agency: Ogilvy. Playlist at the end of this post. — HDFC Life’s new campaign titled ‘The Missing…

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Re-evaluating platform liability when ‘users’ become ‘subscribers’

February 27, 2023February 27, 2023 by Karthik S

Unlike what Kangana Ranaut claimed on Twitter, ‘people’ did not ‘hijack’ Elon Musk’s idea of offering a subscription version of Twitter called ‘Twitter Blue’. Jack Dorsey was still Twitter’s CEO when Twitter Blue first launched, back in June 2021. At that time,…

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Mivi’s nationalistic marketing missives

February 23, 2023February 23, 2023 by Karthik S

Mivi’s new campaign was long in the making and feels eventual. We have gone through ‘Made in Germany’ and ‘Made in Japan’ TVs. ‘Made in the USA’ has long been an aspirational idea in India. But with recent geopolitical changes and the…

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