Ad Nauseam - II

Continued from Part I

You are seated in front of your TV. You see Lisa Ray clad in a figure-hugging body suit doing a free fall from the terrace of a high-rise building. Next she executes a midair stunt a la Cameron Diaz in Charlie's Angels against an unscrupulous element. Wow! Your appetite is suitably whetted and you settle down deeper against the cushions to watch more. But that's all to it. Something flashes by on the screen and it hits you only then that this is only an advertisement. "What?" you say to yourself, "all this was just an ad, that too for a mere pen?"

Welcome to the world of ads. A world where ads dominate more spots on the TV and at times more of the viewer's attention than serials and other programmes. Where an ad can make or break a product. Where today's ad film artiste is tomorrow's film star. This is not some far attached scenario that I am talking about, but stark reality. A pretty perky girl who winked at you before tucking into a chocolate bar barely a year or two back is now winking at you from the billboards advertising the latest blockbuster in town. Yesterday's boy-next-door sipping ice cold drinks in an ad for a fridge after a game of football is today running another game albeit of a different kind - a game show, besides wooing the bahu in saans-bahu serials. Looking at these success stories, it wouldn't be wrong to say, "Behind every successful man/woman (in show business) is a successful ad!"

Just as filmmakers spare no cost in their quest to make a great film, today's ad makers go to great lengths to make an ad stand out. The results however are not always worth the efforts and most often the ad looks over the top with its opulence and ostentatiousness. An ad made by a popular garment house comes to mind at this stage. The ad makers have packed enough elements into this ad to make it resemble a mini feature film. The ad goes like this - a dashing young man coming home to his family amid all pomp and splendour even having finished off a movie style fight en route his homeward journey. Besides his parents, waiting for him is his blushing bride-to-be. The ad makes for good viewing however whether it has influenced the viewer's taste in clothes or not is a different matter altogether. Similar to the above in terms of ostentatiousness is another ad by a telecom company. A football game and a very pregnant lady going into labour right at the stadium forms the backdrop of he ad. However the entire scenario seems very unbelievable. For one thing no one in his right mind would bring a very pregnant lady to a noisy boisterous football game. Football fans are notorious for their behaviour. Keeping this in mind, the story of the ad just doesn't ring true.

Another point to be noted in today's ads is that children are being wrongly educated through ads made in obvious bad taste. "Mummy isse naa nahin kahegi" proclaims an ad loudly to lure kids into buying milk chocolates. Take this scenario. Two little kids. One has a mother who constantly admonishes him for eating ice candy and the other kid's pretty cool with a cool mother who encourages her child to eat candy simply because he uses the allegedly better toothpaste!!

Such kinds of ads send out wrong messages to children; being impressionable and innocent, they get taken in and can even turn against their own parents.

The lack of creativity shown in some of today's ads not only jars the viewers' senses but also spells doom for the product. One such ad is for a brand of soap that was hitherto famous for its waterfall scenes with young women. Take the scenario. A pretty young thing looking like she's freshly stepped out of a shower, wearing some itsy bitsy summer dress. A scorching hot desert. You think the scene is prefect to introduce a sunscreen lotion or a sun block cream. But you couldn't be more wrong, the ad makers had completely different ideas. You see, they planned to make this as an ad for a soap. So now they have this pretty young thing in a hot desert. So far okay but where's the water you ask? The ad filmmakers too perhaps realized this as an afterthought. For an ad selling soap as a product to have no water would be sacrilege. So they pondered and came up with a supposedly brilliant idea. Where does water come from in a desert? Of course the women carry it home from some far off wells. So en route they must encounter this girl who will then provoke them like a Spanish matador in an arena. They then splash water all over her thus enabling her to use the soap. What they did not take into account was the whole thing would look ridiculous and stupid making even a seasoned ad viewer cringe.

Perhaps what ad makers ought to do is sponsor an all expenses paid short vacation for their staff to some remote island to boost their creativity. Perhaps they too can join in. And thus ensure that the viewer doesn't get taken for a ride.