You know why I watch TV nowadays? For the World Cup? What a bore that is! Test Cricket? Murder in slow motion I say! Sitcoms so I can go haha? Shut up you fool!

Readers of Hafta! What I really wake up every noon to see on TV are the wonderful wonderful commercials that our many brilliant advertising professionals are coming up with everyday to sell products and services, provide quality entertainment and, most importantly, bill their clients. So it is a pity that there are so many people, especially the pesky young people called youth, who do not appreciate the high quality of contemporary Indian television advertising. I want to take this opportunity to correct this great wrong. Set right this great error. Indeed, I wish to resuscitate this great strangling of the creative respiration of Indian moving picture advertising. (Excuse me but after all I was a highly rated copy-writer myself.)

I have spent many years in the field of advertising. I have come up the hard way (staircase). I know what it takes to take a simple concept and come up with a winning advertising campaign. It is a painful process and takes many creative people many many nights of hard work and not small amounts of substance abuse before they emerge from smelly rooms in underwear and announce concepts like Pepsi TV.

Pepsi TV. Now that is what I call a brilliant television campaign. ‘Why’ you ask? There are so many things that non-creative non-advertising people like you will not understand. (So tedious all of you are.) First of all it is the simplicity of the concept. If you were asked to combine the concept of TV and Pepsi undoubtedly most of you non-creative types would have come up with ‘TV Pepsi’ or even ‘T Pepsi V’. But what did the advertising professional do? He brilliantly came up with the concept of ‘Pepsi TV’. Now how many of you thought of that? So simple and yet so effective.

The campaign is very very insightful you must agree. Every time now you sit in front of the TV you immediately think of Pepsi. On the other hand suppose you saw a bottle of Pepsi first what do you think of next? Exactly. TV. And immediately after that? Correct again. Pepsi. So you see either ways, whether you see Pepsi or TV, the instant mental association is with Pepsi only. A very very brilliant campaign.

But now the bit of real advertising genius: What is going to happen in Tamil Nadu very soon? Think. Come on. Think. You are absolutely correct! They are going to give free TV sets to everyone. Very soon, in a matter of months in fact, Tamil Nadu is going to become a land of TV watching machaans and machis who will all then, by association, guzzle down millions of litres of Pepsi. Join me when I bid a resounding farewell to the filter coffee. BYE!

Buy Pepsi stock soon.

But that campaign is not alone in its sheer brilliance. What about that great creative magnum opus: Thande ka Thadka? (‘The Cool’s Fried Item’ for all you people who do not know proper Hindi.) A most impactful advertising initiative in my book. And trust me my book is very very elite and selective. Most discerning is my book. And Thande ka Thadka is in that very book.

The first Aishwarya Rai advertisement was derided by many people for being pointless and some even said it promoted eve-teasing. This is completely false and baseless. We advertising professionals maintain very high standards of both professionalism, in the work we do, and ethics, in the messages we propagate, on most days of the week. (Except Thursday). 

And I have proof that Thande ka Thadka has, in fact, helped to divert the amoral tendencies of our youth towards the harmless drink itself. Last month I asked a young man named Sahil if he thought the ad was deriding and made fun of women. His exacts response was: “Ditch women dude. I don’t like women. Do you want some Coke?”

That, my friends, is the real impact of Thande ka Thadka. It is all about the drink and not about the eve-teasing. The impact was wonderful. Socially uplifting. If you don’t think so you are merely too proletariat to understand. Even the Aamir Khan sequence was so well done. The first time I saw it I actually thought it was a Japanese fellow who had visited one of those overpriced eating outlets I always seem to go to. (But I can afford it of course. Not like you fellows who go to… yuck!… Coffee Day and all.) What a surprise it was to see that it was actually Aamir Khan! Outstanding actor and landmark ad film.

You will agree by now that advertising is such a powerful medium indeed. It evokes so much emotion in the viewers and of course in the advertisers. Who can forget the brilliant campaign for that pan masala type product? You know the one. The Indian businessman who, fired by the passions of patriotism and provoked by the oppression the East India Company had subjected his (our) dear country to, decides to turn the tables on his foreign acquirer. He smartly changes the contract and <goose bumps>, instead of selling out his firm, buys the foreign one at three times the price. I had to switch off my iPod and sobbed tears of national fervour till my Tommy Hilfiger shirt was drenched. I do not remember the brand but what a great and emotional campaign it was.

If you are still not impressed with the quality of the current advertising we have on our TV channels then you are a cretin. I pity you. Or, in the words of a recent and exceptional campaign, you are simply not one of those people who drink tea. (Now what a wonderful campaign that is. “Hello sir! It is now afternoon!” Ha ha ha. Hilarious.)

[Venkatesan Karandikar is a polymath. He is an authority on many topics of national and international importance and is an excellent Odissi dancer. This does not mean that he cannot sing or write novels or do many other wonderful things. He can. He donates anonymously to several charitable institutions and wishes to reiterate that he was not that guy in the MMS with Karan Johar.]

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