Dense commentary on social media, PR, marketing, advertising and branding.
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…
Zurich, the UK-based insurance company recently announced that they more than doubled the number of male and female applicants for recently advertised openings because they added six words to those ads. The , is mildly infuriating because they do not focus specifically…
The French animal rights foundation ’30 Millions D’Amis’ (30 million friends) has been relentless in communicating and sensitizing people about animal abuse and abandonment for a very long time. It started as a TV program, by the French journalist Jean-Pierre Hutin, in…