I am fascinated by the leap a creative mind take from a simple proposition. Very often, the brief given maybe simple, straightforward and crystal clear. But the creative leap is aided by seeing the same proposition from a different perspective. Case in point: mobile etiquette ads. Several phone companies have done these – in India, the Vodafone ones urging you not to take pictures with your mobile phone camera comes to mind. A proposition like…

I feel that the art of print advertising is on the decline in India. Take a look at some of the leading Indian dailies or magazines or even the Print Creative Showcase sections of portals like afaqs, and you’ll know what I mean. The issue: execution. Compared to the best ads from the West, Gulf or the Far East we suffer hugely on execution. A handful of ads (Luxor – Che, Charlie, Hitler) are exceptions…

Tata Sky has opened a new turf in the DTH wars. With the launch of Tata Sky Plus, the attempt was to create a distance between them and the competition and not fight the game in terms of number of channels or bouquet of services. This time around, Tata Sky’s quality of service is portrayed as a differentiator. The Tamil ad features Asin, who seems to be complaining about her washing machine to the Tata…

The benefit of wide screen TVs have been dramatized in many ways – remember the TVC spoofing a Hindi movie scene with the hero-heroine running across the corner of the screen and taking forever to meet? Now, if I could only recall the brand. Anyway, here is a fresh take on the ‘really wide’ proposition on radio.  Videocon-tv-goodbye Maybe the lady was in a really big house and the TV was a regular one. There…

I remember Dove from the time I read Ogilvy on Advertising – it’s one-fourth cleansing cream proposition was a classic. In India, the landmark TVC was it’s testimonial ad of ’90s. The brand generated a lot of buzz with it’s Campaign for Real Beauty effort a few years back. The work has always been a mix of rational and emotional sell. While there were direct comparisons to ordinary soaps (ph strip test), there were also…

Hunger pangs strike at the fag end of the workday and you normally reach for that oily vada or any other greasy snack. Several brands have attempted to change the habit in the recent past – Snickers and Britannia’s Nutrichoice come to mind. The creative execution ranged from exaggeration of the problem to establishing the moment of hunger (4pm) dramatically. Take a look at what Goodby, Silverstein and Partners did for Emerald Nuts, with a…

Among the crop of Insurance ads in India, this new effort from Aegon Religare certainly has a powerful insight. The idea: life is going to be expensive in the future and hence you need to work out a decent kitty as your pension. With inflation the way it is and the universal belief that ‘everything was cheap in those days’ it certainly strikes a chord. We also have Irfaan Khan at a chemist interacting with…

Happened to see this new commercial for Ford IKON on the net (increasingly that’s where I am discovering new commercials!). I am not a car enthusiast and to me it seemed like a good proposition that somehow didn’t touch your heart. Or head. The characters seemed to act as if they were in some school play with a radio spot-like dialogue delivery. While the idea of juxtaposing a visual which is exactly opposite to the…