Karthik S | beastoftraal.com

Living in perpetual asynchrony

October 16, 2020 by Karthik S

Right now, I’m in the midst of Tehran (Apple TV+), Banshee Season 3 (Amazon Prime Video), Scam 1992 (Sony LIV) and Stranger (Netflix). And in the middle of Works Well with Others – An Outsider’s Guide to Shaking Hands, Shutting Up, Handling…

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The Nude Bomb

October 15, 2020 by Karthik S

I came across the hilarious new ad for R.M.Williams boots, an Australian brand. The ad is scripted and produced by Maximum Effort, the agency founded by Ryan Reynolds, a friend of Hugh Jackman who stars in the ad. The ad is perhaps…

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Advertising IRL

October 14, 2020 by Karthik S

I write so persistently about advertising narratives, but I also am acutely conscious that people do not take advertising as seriously as the advertising world does about itself. Advertising exists in the service of a product or service, and not necessarily on…

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Tanishq’s Ekatvam, the oneness, broken

October 13, 2020 by Karthik S

Have you seen the new Tanishq Ekatvam ad film titled ‘Confluence’? No? You cannot, anymore. Because Tanishq has officially succumbed to the online trolls and removed the video from all their platforms. Watch a copy of the ad, here: They started with…

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O Henley

October 12, 2020 by Karthik S

How many types of t-shirts are you aware of? I mean, the specific styles. If you asked me this 2 weeks ago, I would have thought about it for a bit and said – round-neck, v-neck, full-sleeved, half-sleeved, polo and so on….

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Own, stream, rent.

October 9, 2020 by Karthik S

There are enough jokes online about unreturned, overdue library books. In our present times, though, ‘library’, ‘unreturned’ and ‘overdue’, all sound like vestiges of a different era. With physical goods like home, car/bike, furniture etc. we started by buying them outright. We…

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Blood relation

October 8, 2020 by Karthik S

Here’s an ad film from March 2019, scripted by Chennai-based Chirpy Elephant and made by Lemurian Productions. I quite like the narrative angle here – to connect a blood donor as a ‘blood relative’, and use the obviously disparate (using broad-stroked stereotypes,…

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