Dense commentary on social media, PR, marketing, advertising and branding.
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…
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…
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…
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,…
When you watch this ad for Lifebuoy soaps, where the “doctor” replies to an exclamation by the boy’s mother, “Lifebuoy?”, “Naya Lifebuoy!”, what do you think? Do you believe that he is a real doctor and that his word carries weight… enough…
When Rediff launched online shopping (as e-commerce was called then) in the late 90s, they did not promote the category. Till Flipkart, in the early 2010s started promoting the entire e-commerce category using the kids-as-adults theme, everyone in the sector presumed ‘What…