Dense commentary on social media, PR, marketing, advertising and branding.
Back in my agency days, one of my larger clients was a car brand. One of their models was to complete a certain milestone (in terms of the number of cars sold in India) and we were brainstorming on ideas for a…
Voice assistants have featured in science-fiction and popular culture in the past too. But now that we have voice assistants with some decent amount of traction among users and the fact that they have become a reality, how does popular culture depict…
Back in March this year, I had written about BBDO (the ad agency network) using LinkedIn to announce how each employee’s home was now essentially a new branch office for BBDO. It was smart, very-agency’ish creativity of announcing that they are all…
How many ways can a brand of mosquito repellant advertise itself? We have had the cream variety like Odomos for a few decades now. Then the coil variety, pioneered by Tortoise. The electric, smoke-free gadget with a ‘mat’ was launched in the…
In Christopher Nolan’s 2010 masterpiece, Inception, Arthur (played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt) asks Saito (played by Ken Watanabe), “If I say to you, don’t think about elephants what do you think about?”. Saito responds: “Elephants”. That is the easiest explanation of framing in…
This independence day (74th Indian Independence Day), two taboo products came to the fore in unusual and conventional ways. The conventional one first – adult diapers. I adult diaper brand Friends’ new campaign that utilizes the independence day-centric Azaadi Mubarak theme last…
I recall seeing ads for adult diapers/dry pants in US-based magazines that do not have the ‘look’ that the category usually gets in India. In India, for some reason, the ads tend to use a fuddy-duddy outlook. But one Indian adult diaper…