The Ads must be Crazy

I know I haven’t updated in a month. It is mostly because I was on a 6-week holiday (yes, for 6 weeks!) mostly at home with my brother working on a secret project. The holiday was awesome and the secret project is now scrapped... so happy new year!

The first NRI thing my brother did after coming to India was to get all psyched up about cricket. He made me watch a test match on TV! The cricket was awesome but the broadcast... well let me sum it up for you. Watching cricket on TV in the IPL era (2008 onwards) makes me feel like a loser. Here’s why…

Ads between overs

First of all, we have to watch the same ads over and over and over again! As a kid I used to do it all the time without getting tired or irritated. I wonder how I did it back then. I must be pretty dumb as a kid to not question that practice!

As If watching an ad for 50 times is not annoying enough, Akshay Kumar features in every other ad selling everything from gold loans to cheap mobile phones! It’s the price we all have to pay for being cricket fans I guess!

Have you noticed that soft drinks are not advertised during cricket matches anymore? I wonder why. Have they reached market saturation or are they being outbid by the insurance companies? I really want to know because cola fights were much more fun compared to people asking you to buy insurance, cars, cheap mobiles and paint.

Speaking of paint – why do they have to sell so much paint on TV? Since when is painting your home the most romantic thing in the world? It’s is a horrible activity that involves squeezing the furniture of one room into the rest of the house and then repeat the exercise for each room. Also fresh paint stinks!

In the pre-IPL era ads were shown strictly between overs. In the IPL era, it is the cricket that is strictly between the ads.

Sabotage

The simple joy of watching cricket on TV is now sabotaged by these corporations who are selling the middle class viewers an Indian version of the American dream where everything is for sale and everyone is sold out...

The broadcasters of the gentleman’s game are like gaudy, tasteless pimps and cricket is their bitch!

You Can't Win

The worst thing about this kind of exploitation is that there isn’t much we can do to fight it. We can’t hit the streets to protest. It would look ridiculous! Besides, the editorial columnists will remind us that there are far more important things to worry about.

This is it folks, there is nothing we can do to stop them from insulting us. There is nothing we can do to make them treat us with a little respect. We may blog the hell out of the issue but I am sure the corporations will continue showing the middle finger in the middle of the over and there is nothing we can do! And that is why watching cricket makes me feel like a loser.

P.S: Cartoons courtesy: Satwik... You should totally check out his comic strip on cricket, Taking Guard - @ http://takingguard.wordpress.com/

@Indibloggers: this post on indivine -- http://www.indiblogger.in/indipost.php?post=45535

Its a bad ad world

My tolerance for Ads is pretty high, you give me a pretty girl to look at and I won’t be very critical. However if there is no pretty girl, it better be intelligent! I have stopped watching TV (except for sports) ever since I reached the age of reason (circa 2004 CE according to the urban legends).

I kind of made my own set of rules when it comes to advertisements. As a rule of the thumb any ad featuring Irfan Khan is boring, any ad featuring Akshay Kumar is dumb. Mobile company ads are usually interesting but the Docomo music is so over done that it now feels like inspector Dreyfus scratching a blackboard with an iron glove! The nerve on those people to run the ad so many times! Who do they think they are? Airtel?

Bad commercials are tricky; they stay in our minds for a long time. They are kind of quasi-successful in that sense. How can anyone forget Aman Verma cleaning toilets in the Harpic Ad? I remember the first time I saw it; I kind of forced my mom to boycott Harpic because that is the only way to punish them for inflicting the misery on citizens of India (g2 gets patriotic sometimes).

Speaking of cola ads, Mountain dew is the worst. What are they all excited about? Jumping from the planes, suspended from the air, breaking through glass to spike volleyballs at girls wearing scanty bikinis while riding sports bikes and all that enthusiasm just to drink something that looks like stolen urine sample from a diabetes clinic (now you know why the bottle is green :p).

But there were good ads too. I am sure a lot of us remember coca cola’s “pandav kitne the” ad which urged people to pay only 5 rupees for coke (most shopkeepers used to charge one rupee extra). It was around the time this ad was popular, a shopkeeper asked 6 rupees for a coke. So one of my friends making a reference to the ad asked the shopkeeper, “Pandav kitne the?” And the shopkeeper promptly responded, “Draupadi kosam oka rupayi egestra andi“, which translates in Hindi to “draupadi ke liye ek rupee extra saab”