He stopped by the doorway, hefted his jeans higher, pushed his Stetson higher up his brow, and proceeded to pull out a pack of cigarettes from his pocket. Out came a Zippo, and its flickering flame gave life to 2 curling tendrils of blue smoke. He inhaled deeply, and the creases on his brow vanished, a smile appeared on his lips and he leant his shoulder against the doorframe as 2 fingers closed around the stick and pulled it away from his lips. The tip of his tongue swept over his lips and a moment later, billows of smoke blew the wisps of smoke emanating from the end of his cigarette into nothing.
His horse, stamping the ground behind him, shifted its weight and tossed her head. The whites of her eyes stood out wildly in the dark. She strained against her harness, whinnied loudly, stamped her foot, and fell over in slow motion. The screen went black. And out of the oblivion, appeared jagged words in white “Passive Smoking Kills… Too.”
Simple, yet hard hitting.
They don’t make commercials like that anymore.
These days, the commercials on air, barring a scanty few, seem to showcase more tongue-in-cheek humor as in the naukri.com advertisement; extravagance like the horde of Rajasthani villagers lighting up a palace in the HappyDent advertisement, or skin. They also appear more than willing to play with a person’s aspiration – the “wear a white shirt and get a promotion” syndrome, or tug at the heart strings a la the “Hamara Bajaj” ad.
Creativity, I think they call it. Want a more colorful phrase? Try ‘lateral thinking’. But how is it that such “creativity” has become so run-of-the-mill? How is it that all those creative thinkers, who get to warm seats in a plush air-conditioned office, drinking pots of coffee billed to the client, and paid shit-loads of money to think up “fresh” ideas, invariably end up going for tried and tested scenarios that hold the viewer’s attention for around 3 seconds, and leave no brand recall?
Some ad-men are quick to argue that these ideas, stale as they may sound, work… at least when it comes to picking up a few Lions and Leaves at international advertising forums.
But if that’s the case, and the rule-of-thumb that the advertising world has come to follow, it’s myopic at best.
Others put forth a theory that the client takes the final call, and tried-and-tested is the order of the day. Plausible, but a little hard to believe… because as a student of management, one of the first things that’s drummed into heads is that the life and recall of a product will be directly proportional to the factors differentiating it from its competitors.
It’s a blame-game that has no end in sight. But from the perspective of a layman who’s subject to these visuals every time he turns the tube on, “something new” is definitely “top of mind.”
And so it appears, that a harsh, matter-of-fact re-look at the trash clogging the airwaves is in order. Maybe it’s time to go back to the drawing board and really put the gray cells to work. Or maybe, it’s time advertisers went home and really thought about how the present commercials dilute the value of the product, giving it an “also available on the shelf” persona, and come up with better ways to push their products to the world out there.
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