Saturday, December 10, 2011

Cadbury Perk - Gorillafication




So when you thought the ‘rista scenes’ were limited to the TVCs of tea brands, the chocolate world steps in too. Generally one gets to see good ads when it comes to Cadbury but this new Perk ad is just plain irritating. It gets worse when one compares it to the advert of Dairy Milk, which is good enough. This comparison leads one to the realization that the quality of the TVCs & other advertisement mediums are directly proportional to the price of the product. From a business point of you this makes pure sense.

However, the thing that does not make sense & should not make sense is the lack of innovative ideas to promote one’s products that are allocated comparatively lower budgets. Though I don’t know what & how the budget allocations are done at Cadbury, the outright thoughtless TVC for perk brought me to this budget discrimination aspect as an observer.

This also gives a hint on the fact that the advertising agency & the company behind the product(s) are not working on the same page, something that is one of the main reasons for our industry’s mediocre output. It is one thing when the work is being done for a ‘saith sahib’ who in most of the cases not going to be interested in ideas but will be happy with the copied material that is fixated in his mind, but if similar results are seen with Cadbury & its likes then the situation gets really frustrating. 



Tuesday, December 6, 2011

Balance between Words & Pictures


A picture is worth a thousand words.

I for one am an adherent believer of this statement. However, there are some limitations to it as well & the conflict erupts when a picture is used to overpower the strength of the written word. This I feel is happening a lot more these days. It feels that the attention span of people is reducing by the day, something that for me does not really indicate the result of a higher evolution. 

A few days back, while discussing ideas for how to get maximum traffic for the Pakistan Sustainability Network, a fact that came across was that a simple random picture of a spoon got around three hundred hits & if any of our blog posts get these many hits we might just hit the roof ourselves. (And NO, we don’t do boring stuff). This episode instantly took me back to Gary Shteyngart’s novel ‘Super Sad True Love Story’. A story portraying the future ultra technology oriented world, where the main character Lenny Abramov, is being looked down because he reads real books & has a ‘wall of books’ in his apartment; instead of just streaming the stuff & covering the main points. In one of the chapters when he is on a flight & opens his book, the passenger sitting next to him tells him that the book has an awful smell!!!

Not really a bright picture.

The point is not to state as to which way of expression is better because there are things which can’t be compared & this is one such point, where comparison is pointless. The concentration point is the loss of balance. Skimming through material can work at times but for in-depth understanding one needs to get in detail. There is no alternative to this. A lot of misrepresentation results because people don’t bother to go below the surface and discover the details and then analyze them. All this requires proper attention span and concentration. In this age of technology, to ensure that this advancement is used for proper progress, people need to return to a balanced position, only then we can move from the complaining stage to solving the problems stage.