Karthik S | beastoftraal.com

The communication challenge around ‘buy our product less often’

December 4, 2020December 4, 2020 by Karthik S

Quite a few clothing brands have, from time to time, spoken about responsible fashion. But in doing so, they face an extraordinary situation where they have to ask people to buy their products less often! One of the most famous and vocal…

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Online events with offline elements to boost interactivity

December 3, 2020December 3, 2020 by Karthik S

I’m not a very big fan of offline events anymore. Back in my client-side and agency-side communications days at Edelman (as head of digital strategy), at Flipkart (as corporate communications head) and at Ogilvy (as head of social media), I used to…

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The car subscription bandwagon

December 2, 2020December 2, 2020 by Karthik S

I thought the recent full-page ad in Bangalore Mirror was the usual one from India’s largest carmaker, Maruti-Suzuki. But it wasn’t – it asked readers if they wanted to ‘subscribe’ to a new Maruti-Suzuki car! We ‘subscribe’ to a lot of things…

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Can you listen to others’ thoughts?

December 1, 2020December 1, 2020 by Karthik S

The first time I came across ‘mind-reading’ in fiction was in Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series. The ‘mentalics’ were able to read minds and hence had no need for spoken words. The idea and thought blew my mind, as good science fiction can…

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The taming of Kellogg’s?

November 30, 2020November 30, 2020 by Karthik S

Kellogg’s recently launched instant upma in India and it seems the brand has become a butt of jokes. The jokes, that have now become viral, seems to have started with one tweet (I’m assuming, given the number of Likes and quote-tweets). There’s…

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Netflix’s incidental success as an advertising platform

November 27, 2020November 27, 2020 by Karthik S

The New York Times, on the November 24th issue, reported that sales of chess sets have dramatically increased in recent times. The timing of the increase in sales was earlier due to the pandemic-induced stay-at-home rules. But in recent times, it was…

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The 6 words that doubled job applications for a company

November 26, 2020November 26, 2020 by Karthik S

Zurich, the UK-based insurance company recently announced that they more than doubled the number of male and female applicants for recently advertised openings because they added six words to those ads. The , is mildly infuriating because they do not focus specifically…

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