Dense commentary on social media, PR, marketing, advertising and branding.
Imagine you saying something and ten different people—all known to you—correct you as you are speaking, in real-time. I’m reasonably sure it would annoy regardless of how well you know those ten people. But that is precisely what seems to be happening…
Shorter version on audio: YouTube: Spotify: Longer post: I started losing my hair in my mid-30s, thanks to my genes. But I did not lose my sleep over losing my hair. I did try some oil suggested by my dad shortly after…
I wrote about one of Zepto’s ads (before the current campaign using singers like Kailash Kher, Shankar Mahadevan, and Usha Uthup) back in February 2022. It had a unique creative device where the vegetable vendor was shown inside a house, and the…
Despite doggedly writing about creativity in advertising, I’m acutely aware that advertising naturally supports creativity, unlike PR where professionals have to find new fonts of creativity within the kind of persuasive work they do. In a way, advertising is like a clean…
Considering I put forward a perspective about Colgate’s new campaign for the Visible White as being tokenism yesterday, it seems fair to add more context on what is and what is not tokenism, when it comes to marketing communications. Let me use…
Shorter version on audio: YouTube: Spotify: Full post: Back in 2019, Colgate India launched the ‘Smile Karo Aur Shuru Ho Jao’ campaign. I recall referring to it in another context (around languages used in the multi-city edition of the campaign in The…
A month after demonetization, Prime Minister Modi, while addressing a rally in Moradabad, referred to a viral WhatsApp video where a beggar was using a card swipe machine to seek alms from people digitally! He was using the story to inform people…