Philips loves us Advertisers

Yes, they like us so much, they've decided that the back-breaking work we do to produce a television commercial should not be wasted. They've patented a television that will prevent viewers from changing the channel when an ad is playing. Wow. I can see hordes of people fighting over a chance to buy this. Fantastic.

They must have been inspired by former television executive Jamie Kellner, who once said that people who went to the bathroom during commercial breaks were "stealing" TV.

Philips has ofcourse mulled this over, and decided that if at all you want to fast forward through the ad, or switch the channel, a nominal payment will give you that option.

Yay, more money in their pockets!

VH1 Headbanger's Ball - False Advertising or Misrepresentation?

April 7th must have been marked on a lot many calenders here in Mumbai. Atleast among all the metalheads who watch VH1. They were premiering Headbanger's Ball at midnight. I'd been waiting for it over a week, and had to miss the last song (had to go to the airport) but for all practical purposes, i could have missed the entire show.

I counted only 3 songs, just 3, that were suited for a show like this. Every other song could have easily been played at primetime or any other time throughout the day.

They started off with a very cliched song for a premiere - Metallica's Enter Sandman. Ok, it's Metallica, but this song has been done to death. They follow this up with Linkin Park. Jeez, what were they thinking? GnR's Sweet Child Of Mine is a great song no doubt, but a headbanging song it aint. Neither is Creed's What If, which if you ask me, sucks anyway.

So the 3 songs - Slipknot's Wait and Bleed, Nine Inch Nails' Pig something, and a song by Death (which incidentally didn't get its song/band/album name displayed).

There was some real bad stuff too. A horrible live performance by Deep Purple, totally destroying Highway Star, and a slow, slow, slow, boring song that I first thought was by Sade, but turned out to be something by Drowning Pool.

So what is this, false advertising? I'd be tempted to call it so, but no, that's a bit too harsh. This seems to be more ofa case trying to please veryone, as wide a demographic as possible. Creed, Linkin Park, Death, and Nine Inch Nails on the same show? That's what they're missing. Focus.

Ok, I think i'm trying a bit too hard. Over-analysing. Lets just say, I'm hoping for a much heavier show next time round.

One Night @ Saatchi & Saatchi

I love work. It gives me purpose. And purpose is what defines us.

So anyway, I just spent 32 hours at work. Wicked, eh? From 9 in the morning yesterday, to 5 in the evening today. With about 2 hours of broken sleep. We wrapped up our session (notice i didn't use the word "work", because we weren't all done) at around 6:30 in the morning, the team left, and I couldn't stay awake for much longer. Ofcourse, the night watchman was winding up his shift, and insisted on sharing some office gossip with me. I would have retained some of it if I was even halfway awake, but I was pretty much lost to the world. Staring at him with blank eyes. He must have gotten the message, I don't know, he left. I slept.

Got back up at 9, even though the team came in only by 11. Finished up work, stumbled through the day, and when I couldn't take it anymore, I left. This was just before the client meeting, but I didn't want to fall asleep in the conference room. Anyway, I hope they like our work, wouldn't wanna redo it all over.

Anti-Maria ads = Anti-sales campaign?

My mom told me about an interesting incident that happened at work. Every evening, the workers are given Marie biscuits and tea. Some days back, they refused to have the biscuits, and were giving people a hard time.

When my mom went to ask them what the problem was, they said they're not going to eat Marie any more, since the people on tv keep telling them not to have it. My mom was taken back. She tried to explain how that is just an ad, and what Marie is trying to say is that there is now a new Marie, much better than the older one.

Uh-huh-huh, they simply refused to listen, and as a result, some other biscuit brand is used.

Sometimes, agencies try too hard. Ads do backfire.

I have no idea about the future...

...because the future isn't Orange, it's Hutch.

Yes, I can see the cute doggy staring at me from those billboards. "Hutch is here." Hutch is also pink now. According to Naveen Chopra, VP-group marketing, in today's DNA, "We went through the whole colour palette but there were colours associated with other companies, so those were rejected. Through elimination we came to pink." Oh wow, morsels to a starving man?

Here's an article from the Hindu Business Line on the launch.

3.5 crorse for this??

According to reports, Ford paid Abhishek Bachchan 3.5 crores to endorse the Ford Fiesta. That's a heckuva lot of money.

And for that amount, this is the best they could come up with??

Agency - JWT

The Economic Times campaign..

Here's a really well done campaign for the Economic Times. Great visuals and minimal yet effective usage of text.

Ps. these are newspaper scans, hence the low quality. And the last one was bigger than my scanner could handle, so the copy is missing. It's the same as the others.

20 Days In Kochi... Footprints Recapped...

I spent a month in Kerala, doing this -

FOOTPRINTS - This is an annual series of media seminars that the students of SIMC organise. It usually happens in 10 cities around the country, and is conducted entirely by us. Event themes, speakers, sponsorship, and all that jazz. The college doesn't help (they're more of a hinderance really). And we have to do this, it's a module worth 50 marks. If you flunk, you don't get a diploma. We chose to go to Kochi.

IN KOCHI - 7 of us went to Kochi, all first timers, the only footprints team this year to not have any, well, natives, for lack of a better word. Three of them knew malayalam, so we could communicate around. We stayed in a rundown hotel, for free, friend's contact. Kochi is a very cheap city. Printing, travelling, eating. Ofcourse, everything shuts down by 9:30, so that suxx. But the city is fun. It's quite clean, relatively open, no over-population.
The buses are great, huge windows and canvas shutters, so it's never claustrophobic inside. It's a joyride really. These drivers apparantly use brakes only at the stops, and drive like maniacs at breakneck speed. Narain Karthikeyan fastest Indian my ass.

THE EVENT - Our theme was "Sailing On The Banana Boat - Where's the Malayali Media Headed?" Sounds a bit corny, but we came up with it in a crunch, and never got around to changing it. We covered -

• The current status of the media in Kerala
• Expansion across regional and national boundaries
• What they see in their future
• Upcoming career opportunities

We held it at BTH, Darbar Road Hall. About a 160 students attended. Good turnout. Our speakers were -

• R. Pillai, News Director AIR Thiruvananthapuram
• Kamal - National Award winning film director
• T. N. Gopakumar - Host of Asianet's "Kannadi"
• Sebastian Paul - Journalist turned M. P.

The event was on the 25th. I reached Kochi on the 4th night, and left on the 26th.

AFTER THE EVENT - Went to Roshan's aunt place, 4 hours from Kochi, forgot the name. Then went to Idukki, heheh, and proceeded on to the Periyar sanctuary. It's a beautiful, beautiful, beautiful, place. So green and lush!!

FInally, came back to bombay on the 31st night.

Ads get creative...

Aluminium pegs and the sun create a cool ad!!

And this one for the Ford Mondeo.

Spidey 3 - The Sandman it is!!

Hah, this is great, some concrete casting news!! And now, Topher Grace, Electro, or Venom? Definetely not Ned Leeds, I hope.

But seriously, if they have Venom and Sandman in the same movie, i can't see how they could possibly play off each other. Unless the Sandman is just gonna be there just for a minor pre-credits fight. Or if they screw his character up like they screwed up the Scarecrow in Batman Begins.

I give you... Freecell.

Yes, this game is addictive. Gordon Frohman has simply confirmed what i've experienced over the past month.

Don't Quit Your Day Job Yet...

Hah! While doing a bit of ego-surfing (google: bottlehed), I stumbled upon one of my forum convos with good 'ol Jorgo. An aborted attempt to write a short story, it's pretty funny.

JORGO
Today I came back from a walk and the wind was sweeping a piece of paper by my feet. On one side two lines of text were written. I picked up the paper, dirty from the dusty ground to read what was written on it.
Curiously, the lines read:
I love you, I love you. I promise, I will never play chess again
Doesn't that fuel your imagination somehow? I invite you to make up a little story around those facts... let's see what you come up with!

ME
K, first line...
He could never remember - did the horse thing jump in the l-shape, or was it the elephant?

JORGO
In the words of Sage: "Don't quit your dayjob yet." Somehow I wasn't imagining this as a comedy although I never let a good pun pass by myself (or a bad one, for that matter). Well, fair enough.
My story would start like this:
He had everything thought out until the last move. He had calculated all the possibilities, all the logical reactions and all the consequences. Yet there was one thing that he hadn't taken into account and that would prove his undoing: He was not only the player, but also a piece...

ME
You're supposed to continue from my line...
Anywez, i'll take off on your start
..unfortunately, he couldn't figure out which piece he was. The agility of the horse intrigued him, but a childhood trauma left him scarred, and forever vary of the L-shape (but that's a story for another day).
Ofcourse, he identified his love for peanuts as a sub-conscious desire to be the elephant, but the pachyderms never forgot, and he could barely remember his head if it wasn't screwed on...

JORGO
Elephant? Horse? He had come to a point where he couldn't tell game and reality apart. This damned addiction to eating peanut butter sandwhiches! One day his clogged arteries would put an end to his career as a chess master.

ME
But till that day, he'd treat life like a black-and-white chessboard...

JORGO
And now it was time to check the queen...

Hah, an abrupt end. No doubt Jorgo was flabbergasted...

Pune to Mumbai.. I watched Coolie

Yup, this is so much like old times. It's 3 in the morning and i'm surfing the net, and it's just an hour since i got home.

Did i have a good bus journey? Depends upon what you consider good. See, i had some cheese pav bhaji for dinner before boarding the bus. I could have easily left off the cheese, as i got more than an overdose on the bus. They played Coolie. Atrocious. Appalling. Aggravating. Absolutely lousy. This crap showcases everything that's wrong with bollywood. Insanely bad acting (everyone's hamming it up like there's no tomorrow), cringe-worthy innanities passing off for dialogues, and a plot so contrived, it's incredulous that anyone could actually have watched this without laughing their guts out atleast once.

And bollywood's trademark middle-finger to sense, sensibility and logic. One case in point - Amitabh's character uses the hawk as his election symbol. When he's on stage giving his speech, the bloody backdrop is that of a bald eagle. A bald fucking eagle. Does nobody in bollywood know the difference between a bloody hawk and a fucking eagle?

I swear, if this kind of stuff was played in our screening, i'm willing to bet some of would actually take the effort to stay awake.

The Island

It was a Michael Bay movie alrite. But for a moment there, i actually had hope. An interesting enough plot, competent acting from all involved, and well, no faults in diection.

It's actually half a Michael Bay movie, because things start blowing up only in the second half. That's also probably when he lost all interest in what he was filming, and let it all go to hell.

See, because throughout the movie, there was this constant sense of Deja Vu, if, that is, you've seen the Matrix, or Minority Report. It's the treatment, i suppose, or maybe the story. I can't figure it out. But whatever it is, movie manages to engage you in the first hour.

Supposedly set in the future, one that doesn't really seem all that futuristic, the story (SPOILERS) is about a corporation that's raising made-to-order clones to be used as organ donors and replacements. All this while, the clones are being led to believe that they're the only survivors of some kind of holocaust - contamination, i believe, was the term used. However, Ewan MacGegor's Lincoln Six Echo (yes, his name in the movie, there's a reason for it) begins to question his existance in their perfect, sanitised world.

As for the movie title, it's not really all that relevant. It's just a snappy, catchy title for the movie to have.

There are some logical loopholes in the movie alright, and a lot of times when suspension of disbelief is needed, but if you ask me, the only major conceptual fault lay in the fact that it's hard to believe the corporation's method were anywhere near cost-effective. Just to sell a single organ, an entire underground complex was created, incredibly huge holographic shields were used to hide that fact that they were underground, and the clones had every kind of facility needed at their disposal; the health clubs and swimming pools. I find it very hard to believe that some rich people would pay such a lot for some organs, enough to keep the entire corporation afloat.

That apart, Scarlett Johansen is pretty much wasted in this movie, but you don't hear me complaining.

P.s. Steve Buscemi is still da man!!

Fargo on GTA San Andreas!!

Hah!

This is a hilarious and highly sarcastic view at the GTA Hot Coffee patch controversy. It's true, what the article implies. Larceny, robbery, and cold-blooded brutal executions with a variety of materials is all ok for teens, but the moment nudity hits the scene, it all goes for a toss. So the game is now AO. Adults Only. Hehehhe...

Not A Bad Day At All..

So it wasn't the best of starts. Kohinoor vs Kamasutra didn't get us the kind of response we expected, but we did learn we were arrogant and cheaters. Right, let nothing be a waste, always learn.
I got my conflict presentation done too. Saudi Arabia - Yemen border conflict of 1994. Crisp, short, and to the point. Not because I was concerned about audience reaction, but because I thought I was prepared, when I actually wasn't. So all I was doing was reading off the slides, and trying to find my way through the hard copy.
And the play. I slept through every alternate line in the first half. In the second half, I was eating some chinese in the mess. But I liked what little I saw nevertheless.
So another day, another lesson...

Faux Pass?

"Faux Pass" is apparantly "Fau Paa" ??

Redneck dad to son, "How many legs dat dawg haf sonny?"
Redneck son to dad, "Fau, Paa!!"

Yup, I still got it.

Screenings at SIMC

We have screenings three times a week at SIMC.

So far,
SERIALS
Chanakya ep 1-3, progressively better
Mirza Ghalib ep 1-3, ditto

MOVIES
Ankur - decent
Nishant - fell asleep after the opening credits
Charandas Chor - Damn funny for the first 20 minutes, then degraded and put me to sleep. Then saw the last 30 minutes.

DOCUMENTARIES
Jack The Ripper
Search For Atlantis
The Leopard Son

ROCKUMENTARIES
A Hard Day's Night - Unfortunately, fell asleep midway. Saw the beginning and ending.

OTHERS
U2 - Live - forgot where (actually it was a free lecture, not a screening really)

All these are in the afternoon, after food, in a room without a/c or proper ventilation. No wonder most of us fall asleep. Atleast, I do.