Dense commentary on social media, PR, marketing, advertising and branding.
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…
Shorter version on audio: YouTube: Spotify: Full post: Back in 2019, Colgate India launched the ‘Smile Karo Aur Shuru Ho Jao’ campaign. I recall referring to it in another context (around languages used in the multi-city edition of the campaign in The…
A month after demonetization, Prime Minister Modi, while addressing a rally in Moradabad, referred to a viral WhatsApp video where a beggar was using a card swipe machine to seek alms from people digitally! He was using the story to inform people…
Shorter version on audio: YouTube: Spotify: Full post: The electric 2-wheeler segment in India has a problem. A big reputation crisis, to be precise. Even though incidents of electric scooters going up in flames are far and few (relative to the total…
If you are wondering what that title means… persist. You would get your answer at the end of this post 🙂 What’s the first thing that comes to your mind when I say ‘Surf Excel and Doordarshan’? Chances are, it is likely…