Hits the spot

Addendum is a fortnightly 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.

Remember last August when Airtel and Taproot launched the Har Ek Friend Zaroori Hota Hai campaign? Well, looks like August is their time to release new TVCs (Salman likes August too). This time too, Airtel and Taproot stick with youth, friendship, sharing, Internet and music. And they have an outright winner again. I like everything about it. The tune is a foot-tapping number that pleasantly buzzes around in your head long after you have seen the TVC.

The casting is spot on, with the raw energy of youth filling the frames with non-stop action. The lyrics are great and the situations very real. And if you thought the 65-second version on TV was enjoyably long, don’t miss the complete version on YouTube. You’ll love it. The film ends with a quick visual about Airtel Internet, and that’s all the overt branding it gets.

But hey, when you are on a real creative roll, the memorability just slides in effortlessly.

Last year the main TVC spawned several “quickies” that had some hilarious situations. I can’t wait to see what they have in store for us after this main film. Aggie, take a bow, and come back for an encore!

Despite Big B …

You need a lot of nerve signing up a mature male celebrity to endorse a house-cleaning liquid while correcting the lady of the house in the bargain. It could really backfire horribly. But somehow if that male celeb is Amitabh Bachchan, you could actually pull it off. And that’s what Lowe has done for Luxor Nano Clean.

The TVC is nothing more than a hurried (very hurried) situation where the Big B generally stops the domestics from using some normal cleaner and prescribes Luxor Nano Clean which is gentle yet thorough in its cleaning job because it uses “nano technology” (something as impressive and unintelligible as the Ultrons in Surf). Well, as I said Mr Bachchan has that quality that can make something very ordinary into something quite acceptable. Even he wouldn’t be able to make this extraordinary, though!

A thing of beauty

If you liked the creative treatment used in the Happydent commercials, you will love this TVC for Greenlam laminates by McCann Erickson. The art direction is great. The song is something that worms itself into the recesses of your mind and then plays ad nauseum.

The concept is well, interesting. There’s this “beauty man” ( saundarya premi ) who goes about beautifying everything around him in some scenario set in the distant past. When his sidekick asks him what will happen to the future, the “beauty man” rolls out the Greenlam laminate and proclaims that this will keep the world beautiful in the future. The connect between beauty and Greenlam is strong. That’s all I will be saying. I leave the rest to your respective tastes.

Velocit Eazy

Once you have gotten over the name of this product and figured out that it is a pregnancy tester everything else falls into place. Dr. Reddy’s is now positioning this product as something that is really easy to use, and takes just three minutes to give a very accurate result.

And so DDB Health Care’s TVC translates the brief very faithfully and effectively into a film where a pretty young lady needs to just keep her husband holding the telephone line (what’s three minutes when you are worrying about an outcome that could change your life) and then happily announce that hubby can soon be called papa as well.

Simple bhi , effective bhi . I mean the TVC.

Muddled execution

The threat of breast cancer is very real, and it can be easily tackled if detected early. The need of the day is awareness, and women should be encouraged to see a doctor regularly for check-ups. That is the noble message being conveyed by the Ogaan Cancer Foundation through a film made by Zoya Akhtar.

The idea is that many popular young male stars such as Ranbir, Shahid, Abhay and Farhan speak about what women mean to them, and the critical message about breast cancer keeps appearing as supers on the screens in between.

So you have the voice of the celeb talking about what he feels about women and you have a super giving statistics about breast cancer and that is where a weak mind such as mine is unable to absorb both messages.

While I am trying to listen to the audio and at the same time read the super, I miss out on what is a great effort to promote a very laudable cause. My fault. Poor concentration.

(Ramesh Narayan is a communications consultant. >addendum.brandline@gmail.com )