No, I am not a car salesman. Nor am I trying to open up a business of car brake pads or other accessories. I am talking about commercials urf advertisements urf vigyapan. Arguably, India makes the best ads in the world… and also, the worst! All ads are mostly concept-driven for the product and its target consumer, who is most likely to purchase the same. Hence there are family ads, youth-based ads, young mother ads, old mother ads, emotional ads, senseless ads, funny ads, preachy ads, sexy ads… Let’s discuss a few... No, not just the sexy ones! I mean all of them!

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Car adsIn all of them, you’ll never notice other cars or traffic. The streets of Mumbai, Delhi or Bangalore end up looking like the beautiful streets of Madrid or Miami. Now obviously, the client has paid shitloads of money to endorse his product so he doesn’t want other cars of rival companies to be seen. Toh phir, how do you shoot a car ad without showing other cars? Simple. You shoot it in the valley, hills, jungles, bridges, flyovers, to give you the illusion that it’s the only car on the planet.

Deo adsNow these products are in heavy competition with each other to get the attention of the youth. So, automatically they go into the nightclub space or into the sex-zone. For example, if you use one brand, these girls will get attracted to you. There is this one ad in which there are eight to 10 cans kept and a woman’s hand strokes each one of them (in a very obvious way) and they all go phussss! Except for the main one, which keeps enlarging with each stroke and eventually lets out the spray!!! WTF!!! Yeh kaisa ad hua? There’s another one which has only foreigners in a very cool night club dancing away to the weirdest Hindi song ever recorded called Party Parinda.

Mobile adsSome of them are cool, but most of them fool… you! There is this one particular service provider which makes emotional mobile ads. Emotional ads for mobiles?? The only time you get emotional with your mobile is at the end of the month when you get the bill. Anyway, this new ad shows how people are helping people by giving them a few MBs of internet and changing their lives. Waah, kya thought hai! Kya idea hai! If you have seen this ad, don’t miss one ham model in the hospital desperately searching for blood and the nurse instead of giving him the blood or blood bank contacts, gives him free internet. Bas!! Yeh sabse bada ham moment hai. Because our man blood-sucker (sorry, seeker!) hams even more. For some strange reason, he’s shivering like Om Prakash on a treadmill in Alaska.

Middle-class adsThese include pizzas, detergents, offers, insurance, child care, etc. Just notice one thing in all of them: The woman will always (and I repeat, always) be shown as a housewife. The women are dressed in starched sarees, hair tied in a bun and a red bindi on forehead. Kaafi stereotype hai na? Why can’t they show a working woman? (and when they do, she is her husband’s boss in the office telling him to do over-time, but asking him to leave fast because she has cooked food).

Lack of time and space have compelled me to continue with more ads, but next week in the second part of Commercial Brake. Till then, Happy Shopping!