Dense commentary on social media, PR, marketing, advertising and branding.
How do you manage to remember the birthdays of your friends these days? I still remember having a diary to make notes of birthdays, anniversaries, and other important dates so that I can buy greeting cards and send them. This was, obviously,…
To be honest, I’m not big on gaming; have never been. I have owned a couple of gaming devices, right from the hand-held single-game tiny brick of a gadget bought from Trichy’s Burma Bazaar way back in the 1980s to the Atari…
Back in March 2021, I wrote about an advertising trend that has a lead character meet his/her future self, in service of making a point about a specific product or service being sold. I had listed 5 ads that use the very…
An important fixture in newspaper advertisements that only advertising industry professionals know about and appreciate is the dealer panel. This is usually a horizontal section at the bottom of the ad that lists the dealers of the product being advertised above, with…
A recent ad by the agency Droga5 for Amazon Alexa has a character who is hard of hearing – she says so herself, to the characters in the film within the ad film. That helps the ad’s narrative plug the voice-recognition capabilities…
When Gmail launched on April 1, 2004, many people actually thought it was an April Fool’s joke. Reason? Gmail was offering 1GB storage space. For context, Yahoo Mail offered 4MB storage space at that time for free accounts, while Hotmail offered 2MB!…
Smartphone launches have taken on a predictable annual rhythm. Almost every brand worth its name releases at least one upgrade every year no matter how minimal that so-called upgrade is in terms of hardware or software additions. And many users have conditioned…