Bend it with HP

Addendum is a weekly column that takes a sometimes hard, sometimes casual, sometimes irreverent, yet never malicious look at some of the new or recent advertisements and comments on them.

So what would you do if Deepika Padukone got on to a flight, came straight up to you and referred to you by name and said she was a big fan of yours? Smile and accept what she says with rare aplomb, right? Well. If you had the sense to give up your job as a banker and turn celebrity baker, I guess you would. So that’s the plot in HP’s new TVC for the Pavilion x360 range of PCs. Of course, in between you are shown how the Pavilion can be folded over, and Deepika very casually takes it and shows you something on it and almost walks away with it. So there is a nice and almost natural highlight on the star without losing focus on the product. The film also has a star-struck fan thrown in and a nice touch in the end when the banker-turned-baker asks the star her name (the look of stunned surprise on the fan’s face is evocative) before confessing that he is joking. Nicely done! Should appeal to a youngish audience very well.

Not flying

Let’s stick with celebs. There’s this TVC for Flying Machine jeans starring Arjun Kapoor. So you have Arjun Kapoor who is shown staying in some hotel calling up and requesting his laundry be delivered to his room. Then you are shown a pair of Flying Machine jeans and then you could well cut to what could be an Axe deo commercial. You have all these good-looking women, housekeeping staff, desperately trying to be the one who would deliver the jeans to Arjun Kapoor. So they end up running like crazy, tripping each other and generally turning into rather dishevelled versions of themselves by the time they reach the room and hand over the jeans to Arjun who sees them and displays a remarkable lack of expression. Well, he is shown reading some book called Dealing With Fame , so I guess the first chapter dealt with how to not react when three young ladies arrive panting at your doorstep. So you end up with this rather lazy effort at creativity. It’s really not enough having a celebrity to endorse your product. It’s all how you show it, dude!

Happy furniture

The festive season is upon us, so expect every marketer to pull out all the stops. We will see the usual suspects such as gifts, apparel and white goods, but what I am seeing this year includes some pretty new things like online furniture stores. Pepperfry.com has unleashed a multimedia campaign using very pertinent customer insights. The first TVC shows this young couple going through the normal motions of buying furniture. Choosing the wood, getting it polished, dyeing the fabric, transporting the furniture and all the other painful things you would have to do. And then you have the option of moving your fingertips and ordering online. Well, I cannot remember the last time I went through all these motions, having used interior designers who probably did all this for me. I am also intrigued by how I would show furniture online. The sheer issues of sizes and suitability would confound me. But then I saw the other TVCs which showed Pepperfry.com not just delivering and assembling the furniture in your house or office but also willingly taking it back and refunding your money in a satisfaction-guaranteed offer. And then I read that the company is opening a large new store and had some others already, and it all fell into place. For those who need the look-feel-experience there is the shop. For the young and tech-savvy there is the pure online experience, and one could combine the two as well. Now please don’t ask me why a furniture store is called Pepperfry.com. I honestly don’t know.

Vox Pop: Regular reader Madhulika Rawal kindly pointed out that reader VVR Sarma in his letter to us was referring to the new Bombay Dyeing TVC that shows a teenage girl and her father looking at a lady when the girl prods her father to change his bed covers because as she says, he is just divorced, and hasn’t taken sanyaas . Madhulika finds the ad interesting as usually parents and their children find it difficult to talk about divorce and relationships. She likes the “openness with which the father and daughter converse” and the fact that the father takes the comment in good humour. She concludes that this is a candid way of saying that all is not lost after a marriage ends. Thank you, Madhulika. We agree with your view.

Ramesh Narayan is a communications consultant. Mail your comments to >cat.a.lyst@thehindu.co.in