addendum

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.

Awesome thirst?

I remember the old ads for Limca. They had a certain effervescence, a catchy ditty and the line “lime and lemony Limca” at the end of every commercial. Well, times change. Owners change and obviously communication must change as well. Now a part of the Coke stable, Limca focuses on “thirst”. Or rather, on what works up an awesome thirst. And so you have this young man in a TVC created by Leo Burnett, playing gully cricket, when his mom calls and tells him the “boy’s side” had arrived ahead of schedule to “see” his sister. And that leads to a mad dash for our poor young man. In the background, the voice of the mother drones on about the culinary skills of her daughter, how she makes fantastic kachoris and chutney, mouth-watering gulab jamuns and great dahi bhallas . While this narration proceeds apace, it is synced with scenes of the young man running from shop to shop mentally ticking off the kachoris , the chutney, the gulab jamuns and the dahi bhallas , in a desperate race against time. He finally reaches home and lets the pretty young girl go out with all the goodies, true to the adage that the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach. The film is rather well made. The casting is spot on. The narration is irritatingly effective. The young man’s travails are engaging. So where is Limca in this? Oh, I forgot to tell you that at the end of this two-minute wonder, you hear a voice saying something about working up a thirst and you see the hard-working young man guzzling a chilled Limca. A case of too much of a build-up without tying it up to its logical conclusion.

Rights and duties

So what happens when an online financial service, Quicko.com, decides it needs to motivate Indians to pay taxes? It teams up with Scarecrow to create a campaign that seeks to turn the premise that paying taxes is a duty into a right. It has lengthy monologues with a range of people like ad man Pops (KV Sridhar), Mahesh Murthy of Pinterest, Rajesh Kejriwal of Kyoorius and so on. And you have these folks talking about what drives them, their achievements and what they would like to see for their fellow Indians. And they end by pointing out that paying taxes is not a duty, it is every person’s right! It’s a digital campaign now, and there is apparently a plan to take this to TV. I love the concept. If every Indian began to think it was her right to pay taxes, the number of tax payers would jump exponentially, so would collections, and the government would have a lot more money to do what it is supposed to do. But this campaign? It is at best a “concept campaign” like a concept car at an auto show. A sign of what could come, even what should come. Right now, it’s at best an idea. Powerfully put forth by good communicators like Mahesh Murthy, maybe not as evocatively by others. And then one must ask who the audience is. If it is the communications industry, and one feels that just 2.89 per cent of this wonderful industry (as is the figure for India) pays taxes, this is great. I think this may not be true. If the audience is India, you need to change the faces and names. We love them, but it would be presumptuous to assume that the large part of non-tax-paying India knows and loves our industry people. And would therefore resonate with their beliefs. As I said, a good concept campaign. I hope it evolves. We need such efforts.

Save Bijli

The Havells campaign from Lowe Lintas is a case study in successful advertising. This time it uses a tongue-in-cheek approach with an item-number dancer called Bijli who swoons and is “saved” by someone switching on a Havells fan. The message of saving energy is not lost from the light-hearted approach. In fact, it drives home the point even more forcefully. Thumbs up for Lowe and Havells!

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