Dense commentary on social media, PR, marketing, advertising and branding.
I have been writing a lot about the ways the movie-watching (and consequently the movie-distribution) experience since early this year. Before the pandemic hit the world, I explored the possibility of certain kinds of films reserved for the OTT/home experience and certain…
Quite a few clothing brands have, from time to time, spoken about responsible fashion. But in doing so, they face an extraordinary situation where they have to ask people to buy their products less often! One of the most famous and vocal…
I’m not a very big fan of offline events anymore. Back in my client-side and agency-side communications days at Edelman (as head of digital strategy), at Flipkart (as corporate communications head) and at Ogilvy (as head of social media), I used to…
I thought the recent full-page ad in Bangalore Mirror was the usual one from India’s largest carmaker, Maruti-Suzuki. But it wasn’t – it asked readers if they wanted to ‘subscribe’ to a new Maruti-Suzuki car! We ‘subscribe’ to a lot of things…
The first time I came across ‘mind-reading’ in fiction was in Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series. The ‘mentalics’ were able to read minds and hence had no need for spoken words. The idea and thought blew my mind, as good science fiction can…
Kellogg’s recently launched instant upma in India and it seems the brand has become a butt of jokes. The jokes, that have now become viral, seems to have started with one tweet (I’m assuming, given the number of Likes and quote-tweets). There’s…
The New York Times, on the November 24th issue, reported that sales of chess sets have dramatically increased in recent times. The timing of the increase in sales was earlier due to the pandemic-induced stay-at-home rules. But in recent times, it was…