W
hat I've liked: As they say, there's a time for everything. A time to reap, a time to sow . . . and to add, a time for good ads and a time for terribly ordinary ads. It's a cyclical phase I hope and soon enough a time will come when I will not be scared to switch on the TV for fear of being assaulted ten times during one programme with an extremely boring ad!
This brings me to a question that has been haunting me these days -- won't the constant hammering of an extremely ordinary ad turn your customer away from your product? Why has media exposure taken precedence over imaginative work?
The 90-second Vimal Suitings ad in 1990 had just six exposures to make it one of the most recalled ads for that year in the industries rating. Clearly, recall does not hinge on repetition. It is what captures the imagination that gets remembered.
So in this desert stretch that we seem to be going through, where foreigners eat raw green chillies to 'prepare for India' and other such far-fetched excursions in advertising creativity, one not-so-pedestrian ad comes to mind -- the latest one for Pepsodent. It's the one where three little kids discuss what they want to be when they grow up.
One wants a chocolate factory, the other responds by opting for dentistry to treat all the bad teeth the chocolate might produce and third, the smartest, wants to be a mom to teach her children how to live wisely!
I like it because it is sweet, simple and a slightly more interesting take on an otherwise very ordinary product -- toothpaste! Seeing the world through the eyes of a child always makes everyday life far more fun than it actually is and to use this route was quite a novel way of saying the same old story.
What I've learned: Finding common ground
That no man is an island must be the most cliched truth of all, yet when it comes to our own lives,