Dense commentary on social media, PR, marketing, advertising and branding.
I have been writing about music for a very long time. I started writing music reviews in the late 1990s/early 2000s period for The Music Magazine, a Bangalore-based online music website (now defunct). I then started writing 100-word music reviews on my…
Shorter version on audio: YouTube: Spotify: Full post: Way back in August 2010, Mondelez India, when they were still called Cadbury India, launched the Shubh Aarambh campaign for the first time. But unlike the conventional, traditional imagery of Shubh Aarambh, this one…
In these days of online shopping and a pandemic-induced slowdown in offline shopping, mannequins almost seem like a quaint concept. To some extent, I’d argue that they have become blind spots for us. They seem to be getting more interest in entertainment…
Shorter version on audio: YouTube: Spotify: Longer post: I started losing my hair in my mid-30s, thanks to my genes. But I did not lose my sleep over losing my hair. I did try some oil suggested by my dad shortly after…
I wrote about one of Zepto’s ads (before the current campaign using singers like Kailash Kher, Shankar Mahadevan, and Usha Uthup) back in February 2022. It had a unique creative device where the vegetable vendor was shown inside a house, and the…
Despite doggedly writing about creativity in advertising, I’m acutely aware that advertising naturally supports creativity, unlike PR where professionals have to find new fonts of creativity within the kind of persuasive work they do. In a way, advertising is like a clean…
Considering I put forward a perspective about Colgate’s new campaign for the Visible White as being tokenism yesterday, it seems fair to add more context on what is and what is not tokenism, when it comes to marketing communications. Let me use…