Dense commentary on social media, PR, marketing, advertising and branding.
I saw the new ad for ITC Classmate Hook Ball Pen only after Eularie Saldanha wrote about it in Campaign India. The title of the piece went, “Does Classmate want school kids to mate?”. Now, having read only that preposterous title, I…
Advertising is an awkward combination of fiction and non-fiction. To be interesting, it needs to use fictional elements that lead to suspension of disbelief on the part of the viewers. So, when Axe shows that women get magnetically attracted to the scrawny…
For the first time in the history of IPL (since 2008), we have two competing ad campaigns to entice us to consume the tournament in two different ways! This need did not arise till 2022 because the rights for both TV and…
Two Women’s Day 2023 campaigns by automobile companies that stood out for me, for vastly different reasons: Ford and Mercedes. Ford’s campaign, by the agency VMLY&R, was something of a crowd favorite, given the number of people I noticed sharing it on…
In November 2022, Pirate Ship, the cloud-based shipping software provider for small and medium-sized businesses, launched its first brand campaign made by the agency Mother. The narrative device is hilarious and audacious: People are shown to be in life-threatening distress (being abducted…
In my 4 decades of existence on this planet, the very first time I came across the instruction that ‘one should never rinse the mouth with water immediately after brushing the teeth’ was 2 weeks ago! I stumbled on a tweet from…
The office of Equity, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) at Vanderbilt’s Peabody College of Education last week issued a statement addressing the recent mass shooting at Michigan State University where a 43-year-old gunman shot students at random that killed three students and injured…