What's Wrong With These Ad Companies

Come IPL time and it is the party time for Ads and as the show goes on, the ads are becoming more unbearable. I know many of us are wondering why we moved out of the DD world into this cable world. Being a software engineer I find that I am comfortable with BINARY and like my TV channels to be also BINARY (DD-1 and DD2).

The most conspicuous move that I think for me from the HD cable world to DD is the fact that DD never had such an amount of Ads. So here I am trying to list down some of those worst ads that repeat through this IPL-4 matches and which have stuck to my mind since April.

Micro Max Bling2:
Why on earth is this company trying to ads, I think the top management of the company has to put their efforts first in manufacturing a decent phone and then think about marketing them? What makes the advertisers believe that after watching this ad clip over a billion times that I am going walk through a mobile store and just point to this phone and walk out. If the whole idea of the ad is to use the phone to distract others by twinkling I rather buy a Rs.10 plain hand-mirror and it solves the problem. Why should I be going in for an android phone?

Karbon Mobiles:
I do not consider that repeating “That’s a Karbon Kamaal Catch” 500 times after a simple catch being taken makes this company’s product any worthy than manure. Neither are their concepts of marketing any better than collecting rotten cabbage. Prefer TRAI to make some laws prohibiting these players from selling these phones, more so their ads on prime time TV channels.

Idea 3G:
I was under the impression that the world had just enough space for one Abhishek Bachan until I bounced upon the 3G ad. There are 3 things in this ad which needs to be introspected. 1) Abhiskek cannot act, 2) No pointing in trying to make him look like a fool, 3) If we need 3 persons for 3G, then look at the case of Haywards 5000. Isn’t there one person out of this 1.3 billion population who can replace him, if they do so Idea can make much more profits than the last 5 years put together.

Airtel 3G:
My guess is that these service providers have run out of ideas, they seem to convey more information about existing products such as Facebook, emails than telling the people what is there in 3G. Till now I do not know what is the “G” in the 3G? Looking at these ads, I feel the world was a better place with Raja as Minister and people with 2G connections.

Vodofone:
I think we are nearing the time for retiring both Saurav Ganguly and ZooZoo. Vodofone seems to have lost its plot in marketing and is only specialising in promoting ZooZoo as a Brand rather than Vodofone connections. Also if we look at those stunts that the super ZooZoo is making in the present ads, those have all been done in Tamil cinema 20 years back by our own Superstar who is currently in hospital ever since he met Deepika Padukone in the set. You can guess the reason for his palpitations – hope you catch my drift.

Hero Honda Hunk:
I never knew why should any bike have a reverse gear in the first place? God will only know some bike driver who would say “Reverse is not an option”with a straight face. My first guess is that Hero Honda has got this concept from looking into their sales chart which is in the reverse direction since IPL-1. The second point is that today’s road conditions are much more violent and chaotic than depicted in the clip, perhaps they have to come to reality first before shooting the ad.

Cadburys Chocolate:
I am still wondering as what is being conveyed in this ad. The average age of the family shown in the clip seems to be 35 plus, all of them look like suffering either from Diabetes or from blood sugar.The entire family suffers from lack of brains, I wonder why they need any “Mettai” when their staple food needs to be “Karela” or “Louki”.

Samsung Galaxy Pro:
I am not making a guess but am pretty sure that the person who wrote the script for this ad has a total brain working capacity of a rotten turnip at the most. He seems to be trying to make rhyming words and ends up totally ridiculous. One doesn’t understand as to how “Alone” and “Party On” seems to rhyme according to the ad, another one "Minto Bridge to Meena Bazaar" and its rhyming sentence is "Little Yellow Car". I can state with 100% certainty that my preschool going kid can come up with a much better one. Secondly, why would anybody want to shout out loud on what you want to search on your personal phone?

The worst of the lots are down here:

Crazy Mango Fun Frooti : No comments, I guess every one knows about it.

Nokia-Shar Rukh ad: Why should Shah Rukh try and convince everyone that he has absolutely no acting talents nor does the KKR team have any idea of bowling at the death (Written after the 21 run over by L.Balaji).

TATA Docomo: There are couple of questions that needs to be answered, why in the first place put Shahid Kapoor whose pronunciation is as close to a fish singing in a bowl. Secondly if you are copying Seinfeld why not do it in a better way? Is in not enough if you copy the settings, why copy some of his jokes and put it in a place where it is not funny.

After seeing all these, I think it is far better to rollback the time to 80s and watch black and white TV, the only hitch being you won’t be able get the “Breaking News”.

OMG – I am not able to make sweeping statements

I know that everyone makes sweeping statements once in a while (I hope this one is not) and it is kind of acceptable in normal life. Having said it, the real problem with sweeping statements are it being made by the same person on a frequent basis.

I make this statement based on factual information from a highly informed source (my cubicle mate). It’s we two who are the most affected by the issue; we are sandwiched between the world’s best sweeping statement makers.

So what the hell is a sweeping statement you may ask, so I looked into the dictionary and all I got was “A sweeping statement is a statement that makes a wide-ranging and complete comment about something, or more often, everything. Unfortunately, it is very common for people to make these sorts of statements when they, in fact, are talking about minor groups rather than "everybody" (this being a word they could use).”

Well since we now know what the statement is, you may be asking me why the hell I am talking about it now. It’s because of this stupid guy (much worse than Forrest Gump to be precise) keeps making a statement every hour and today he said “In general I think that all Girls have an opinion that ‘ALL GUYS ARE JERKS’.“. I started to wonder if it is true.

Well I cannot comment on this, not to the fact that I am married with children, but I find that perhaps this statement of his for once may be true. Also it bought me to another question “Am I losing my touch to make sweeping statements of late?” I think project management really makes people dumb and numb. [This is certainly not a sweeping statement please]

Let me elaborate it for you to understand, It always disappoints me when I hear people involved in technology and people who I follow just go out and say things like "Women are good drivers" and I think it really just loses the credibility of the person making that statement even further. The problem is these people also tend to have a bit of authority and others just listen to whatever they say. Prime example: My boss at work.

Some of the statements made by my boss are listed here and then you decide

1. “All those who work on this project [Drowning] will be compensated well later in the appraisal cycle”
2. “Maybe he is, maybe he isn’t but the Truth will come out”
3. “Every project must track the traceability matrix to ensure quality from now on”
4. “This Subway franchise is bad, so all of them must be bad.”
5. “All my team members are acting like imbecile and I condescend to that fact.”
6. “Everyone must be made accountable in this project for better management”
7. “There is nothing like a stupid question, so what is stopping you from asking something?”
8. “We must all develop knowledge optimization initiatives to leverage our key learning’s from this project”
9. “The longer you with my project, the more diverse your profile gets.”
10. “If you all work really hard, then eventually we can fix all the problems.”

So now let’s move on to the next group of people who are born sweeping statement makers – well you guessed it right. The women folk have this inherent DNA which gives them the complete control to make sweeping statements at will. You are mostly wondering how I am making such a bold statement; well I look no further from my home – Wife and my Mother --- QED

There has been no end to the subjects that a woman can talk, take from cooking to cornea transplantation, nuclear gas to nanotechnology, cricket to online poker, washing machines to cryogenic engines – they have the capacity to make bold sweeping statements. And for those entire married “Y” chromosome humans who have an inherent capacity to follow will accept these statements and hence all conflicts are resolved.

It’s getting boring and I will come to the topic now (have to somewhere before the end) – recently since I have been given extra work in current role, I feel I do not have the time to make sweeping statements as I did a few years back. Maybe education and my current role is the main reason. Let me also tell you that it was this skill set of providing giant sweeping statements that got me to my current role too. This is why I am a little perturbed now that I am losing my skill set.

So I guess I have to go back to my basics ie. Start listening closely to my wife, and then get back to some real-time training (Facebook/Orkut Chat) to sharpen my skills since the appraisal cycle in my company is nearing and I have to fill huge chunks of forms stating my achievements in the past year. So folks wish me luck and send me some statements for my reserve.