Expand your thinking

Just saw this via a blog via adsoftheworld. I was looking at some Indian ads for economist (the foreign language typography ones) in a Facebook album. It made me uneasy and I had to check what people are doing with this brand around the world. Thankfully, that was just the indian campaign. No offence meant for the team who did this, but you know guys, it is just not, well, Economist. Full marks for trying, but the baloon still seems like what the brand should continue to do. Marketing pundits, please comment....

Speedy Installation

Yesterday I spotted something utterly unbelievable - an offline billboard for Google Chrome! I was driving on the western express highway, and this was the only billboard that stuck out like a sore thumb. The white billboard sported a yellow folder icon that read "install speed". The subhead recommended that I must install the new, faster browser from Google! Now this led to a few questions-

1) Does Google need outdoor advertising?
2) Who is it talking to? The Internet savvy population of India already knows about Chrome and given it a fair try. (heck, the familiar shiny ball was what made me look at it in the first place!) and those who are yet to be introduced to the World Wide Web would not know what a ‘faster browser’ is.
I think we are too hardened by the low bandwidth and the familiar buffering icon to care about a faster browser anyway (not to dispute the fact that it is).
3) Why are they calling Chrome new? Its first public stable release was on 11 December 2008! And these things don't take time to reach Indian shores as some popular Apple products do.
4) Was the billboard needed by the agency to enter some award category? But I am afraid this does not look like award material.

The questioning didn’t end there! In the evening I saw the second billboard at Shivaji Park. The only change was the folder icon. Now it was red!...More questions -
5) Why? Was there any danger in installing it? Or did the production guy suggest it should be red since yellow does not look so great on white (whatever might be the convention)?
6) why is Google letting this happen? Are these the same guys who approved the brilliant speed test commercials?

If anyone knows the answer to any of the questions above, do write. I probably will read it in Chrome.

Let's Inn'a'vate.

On the 20th November the Times Of India masthead came with a typo! Most of the TOI readers didn't even realise it. Not to cast a doubt on their understanding of spelling and grammer, but what can you expect of the poor souls? They have been subjected to unwieldy half front pages and empty front pages containing empty advertising thoughts for so long! They have grown so used to it, that nowadays they start reading from the 3rd page!
The rest, who noticed it, sighed and pondered for a whole second upon where the world was headed. But those in the Advertising industry itself merely said, ah, another innovation, let’s find out what did it cost Airtel to pull it off.
The sad part here is that we call this Innovation. In real life, innovating means something quite different. In advertising, it means you acquired the rights to shout from the rooftops before anyone else could. Sigh!
And I am sure this will feature in the award entries this year under the category of media innovation and will walk away with a trophy as hollow as the idea itself.
Now I don't wish to be unkind to those who did it. (Who knows, I might need a job in JWT someday!) But I cannot, for the love of Noah Webster, understand why the agency or the client didn’t replace an 'a' with an 'a'??? Now you can't blame TOI for not having an A in the dead centre of the name, can you?
Now I don't discount the possibility that I am off my rocker and what I foolishly thought to be an 'a' for Airtel,  is something quite different, like the manifestation of a bridge between telecommunication and human life, or two entities that cannot escape each other thanks to the 3G-strong bond of communication, or some such PPT nonsense... If that's so, I apologise.
In a day and age where advertising is fast losing the respect it once had, such overzealous adventures need a bit of taming down. Where were the creative directors? Oh, I forget. We are in the month of November...

Facebook Messages. True, True!

Here comes another way to communicate from Facebook! FB Messages! I wonder why these people are against the good old Email. Nothing wrong with it (though it killed the courteous salutation 'dear' and the closing remark 'warm regards' long ago, but no one is complaining). Will people really give up writing long emails (we sure hope some of them do) and get onto status message like cryptic conversations? It reminds me of an old Bud Lite Commercial. All that's said over the phones between friends is an echoeing 'wasssup!'. Maybe one day it will come to that. Status messages will be our only claim to existence. But will I be using Facebook to do that? In my mind the distincetion is clear. Gmail, stick to emails, don't get into social networking (Buzz didn't work, did it?), and Facebook, don't meddle into the email space, or microblogging (FB Lite. Did it work?). If I wish to be all short n sweet, theres always Twitter. My bet's on that as tomorrow's medium of choice...

@ LiteratureLive, NCPA

This morning's session was on e-literature. The panel included the fakeIPLplayer (Anupam Mukerjee, Minakshi Madhavan (the compulsive confessor blog) and Parmesh Shahani (new media analyst and founder - freshlimesoda). To my surprise I got a prize for asking the most interesting question! - I felt it was a nice gesture from the organizers! I asked Anupam if you need guts of steel as well as other body parts to write blogs, since you can easily get dicouraged by the onslaught of negative comments, some of them may even make you stop writing ever again!
The answer was that you need to be thickskinned to be able to take it in your stride and continue writing about what you believe in.