Taking a call

Traffic jams are directly proportional to cell phone usage. ‘Hello, I’ll be late for the meeting, dinner, date, (insert event here), I’m stuck in traffic.’ Since everyone is using cell phones these days, everyone’s also advertising for it to add to the tally of everyone who’s using it.

Reliance uses the age-old story of the Pied Piper. The idea fits in well because the world today is really a large Hamelin — people are wealthy and stingy, they go back on their word, shopkeepers sell their goods at very high prices; landlords take away all the food that the poor farmers grow, leaving nothing for their families. The rich noblemen (politicians) keep counting their money and since they don’t want to waste it on their pets, they drive them away (to BMC’s stray dog initiative).

Enter Pied Piper, aka Hrithik. But whether he is playing the King Akbar or the Pied Piper, there are some mandates to be followed — he has to dance and he must have a talent other than dancing — like shuffling biscuits under cups or playing the flute.  The ad shows that rats are experts at camouflage and that till date, everyone follows, few buy in, even fewer actually buy and nobody subscribes to anything because Hrithik says so.

Moving from Hamelin to another Hamelin — Delhi. Hrithik gives way to Shah Rukh Khan and a brand that still believes 110 million people put together can make something good happen. Clearly, they’ve not been reading the newspapers for the past 33 years.

Last time anyone checked, 110 million people together caused problems like pollution, illiteracy, inequality, slums, corruption, diseases, overcrowding, suicides, drinking, militancy, traffic jams, body odour and seepage. But of course, it is the network of 110 million people who don’t have the first clue about acting, which made SRK bigger, so he has no qualms giving credit to his ‘network’.

Tata Indicom, on the other hand, went without celebrities and with emotions and employees, says R D Sermon, in a tell-all interview. 

Interviewer: Can you explain the idea behind Tata Indicom ads?
R D Sermon: The idea was to occupy the space of listening not just to the words, but to the emotions behind the words.
Interviewer: So, this service is most useful for a Bollywood hero’s brother’s mother who is trying to hear her son talk in spite of 531 bullets inside him?
R D Sermon: What’s Bollywood?
Interviewer: Where did you get that accent?
R D Sermon: I studied in Aurangabad.
Interviewer: About the idea…
R D Sermon: I thought we were talking about Tata Indicom and not Idea.
Interviewer: I meant your idea.
R D Sermon: Oh right. Our spots — Saans and Hansi — are odes to breath and laughter. And in that sense, it’s philosophical. Yet all along, it’s about the clarity of the network that lets you hear the hidden meaning of every breath and the nuance of every laughter.
Interviewer: What about bad breath? Or fake laughter? Will the service help there?
R D Sermon: We have avoided intensely private situations where an observer’s access could be questioned.
Interviewer: Who is the observer here, the guy watching TV?
R D Sermon: No, he is just a viewer.
Interviewer: Is shooting it in black and white an attempt to suggest how stale the idea of a swansong actually is?
R D Sermon: (Philosophically) Ideas are eternal. We opted for a photojournalistic, magnum-like look to the commercials in order to keep it as real it and as naked as possible.
Interviewer: Eternal means old...
R D Sermon: No, I believe I am growing young.
Interviewer: Okay one last question…
R D Sermon: Sorry, have to rush. There’s a presentation of Proactive ideas.
Interviewer: What is Proactive?
R D Sermon: (Winks) Ideas for awards. It lets me stay out of office.
After all this, it’s time to do the new, Docomo. And like the ad says, it takes a second. The only question is who is this new that we have to do? There. Done. Happy missed-calling. And yes, walk and talk, but for god’s sake don’t sing.

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