It is a man's world alright

Some time back we saw our very first Men's fairness cream adverts. And quite a few of us women rejoiced at the sight of it. It didn't change anything in our lives but felt good that finally fairness (in skin colour atleast) was not just the woman's most desired virtue (it isn't a mistake skin colour is a virtue in this country) anymore.

Couple of days ago I actually noticed one of the ads. The difference between the men's fairness cream ad and the women's hit me.

"Fairever" Ad: Asin is getting no attention from this boy because she isn't fair and Ta daaa this cream with kumkum flowers comes to her rescue to win the boy. The boy who had earlier torn her picture away from his now wants to pose with her and the girl very coyly agrees.


Switch to Nivea's ad for men's fairness cream. Here again the boy is rejected because he is dark and then post cream intervention he's almost Brad Pitt and the girls are falling over each other for him. And he gets to play the cool dude and actually shakes his head and walks away from them.

What the?????

I think it was last year or the year before that about the time Kris Srikanth endorsed Fair & Lovely ad that NDTV had "We the people" discussion on this whole fairness cream madness. And one of the Ad gurus (I forget who) said these ads are meant to be empowering women. At the end of each ad the girl gets what she was denied earlier. That being the star hunt and commentator's job if you remember. But I wonder how he will explain this difference that I just talked of?

It is a victory for a woman when this shallow as a spoon, man who earlier rejected her comes back to her. But the man's victory lies in walking away when the woman who was as shallow as one can be has a change of heart!

PHRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRT

Ice cream saga - last word?

Remember I told you about the Pleasure up campaign of an ice cream brand? Based on my acquired knowledge, I had speculated that the advertisement had gone 'wild' to include adults in its market bandwidth. Unfortunately it turns out that I was in fact correct in my guessing. Here's a report that has a brand-domain (?!?!?) specialist saying it is no accident that the campaign has been 'sexed up' but a deliberate attempt to capture the 'broad spectrum'

Question: I saw the Kwality Walls piece of advertising with my 13 year old kid. It embarrassed me no end. I thought ice-creams were for kids. How come? Satish Venkat, Bangalore Answer: Satish, I hope you were the only embarrassed one of the two. Ice-cream advertising is coming of age in India. The concept to examine is the one that points at two forms of brand positioning and advertising. The first form is what I term “narrow spectrum” positioning and the second is “broad spectrum” positioning. When ice-cream (or for that matter frozen dessert) brands enter a market, the first thing they do is pluck the lowest common denominator of the market. This is the child-audience of the country at large. Key and simple insight: Kids love ice-cream. All ice-cream advertising therefore, focuses on little children as consumers and their not so little parents as endorsers and buyers. When you advertise an ice-cream for a 2-15 year old, this is narrow-spectrum positioning. The potential for the consumption of an ice-cream is however, across the base of the population at large. After plucking the low-hanging fruit of the market, marketers focus on the possibility of a broad-spectrum appeal that could grab the child, adult and geriatric alike, into consumption. This is when advertising starts addressing every family member there is to address, with one common appeal. Broad-spectrum positioning however robs a brand of focus. And that is the downside of this kind of a positioning stance. Reasoning: When a brand means everything to everybody, it means nothing to anybody! The ice-cream advertising you are referring to, is an attempt to make the ice-cream as adult as possible. The adult market is full of value. Adults are getting very indulgent today. And its time to capitalize on this trend. Its time to erase memories of the ice-cream as a kiddy thing to do, from the mind of the adult. And therefore, this attempt. Don’t be too embarrassed. Let’s hope the kid at hand does not understand the hidden meaning of all those suggestive notes and tones. I am sure this is a false hope, though.

For more click on this link http://www.deccanherald.com/deccanherald/jun262006/eb1558522006625.asp

This makes sense doesn't it? All the advertisements - print and television has some sex innuendo or the other in it. It is all part of the strategy to include the 'broad spectrum' hmm.

We are from the land of Kamasutra but we will not allow girls and boys to sit together in classrooms. We will give sexual connotations to ice cream but we will not show two people kissing on screen. We will have women in itsy bitsy clothes in every scene of the film to attract the crowd but she has to wear a Saree or a salwar kameez when the hero talks of marriage to her. We will have condom vending machines installed in all public places but will laugh at any one who tries to use one.

We are a very confused people aren't we?

I am not the only one.

I had written about sexual innuendos in advertisements sometime back. Looks like there are many others too, who aren't happy about it.

http://www.thehoot.org/story.asp?storyid=Web5917635236Hoot94959%20PM2130&pn=1

My new obsession and Ice creams

I have been blogging only for a week now. I have posted only 5 or 6 times and nobody really reads them (even if they do, very politely leave no comments). So it is just an attempt to let my creative juices (!?!) flow. All this has not stopped me from thinking about the blog though. Every time I see or hear something new, interesting or not I say to myself 'hey that should go on the blog.' So in the last four days I have thought up of a million things ok well about 6 subjects to discuss on the blog. I even formulate the entire posting in my head, but since it is easier to think than to type it all out, I don't suppose there will be as many postings. But this one subject I can't get it off my head.

Every time I watch the Kwality Walls commercial on TV or on a hoarding. I want to scream WHY? It says "Kwality Walls, Pleasure up!" It is not the tagline that bothers me it is the sexual innuendo (!) that irritates me. Ice cream is a simple, innocent and most amazingly yummy thing invented by human beings. And to do that to ice cream is sacrilege! The pleasure up campaign has been going on for a while now.

I am told this is associative marketing. These days almost every company does this. That's the reason you see a skimpily clad woman in every damn ad. Be it shirt, home, bank, cool drink or even dog food there is the woman. I remember reading somewhere that Pepsi became a huge success when they had Michael Jackson feature in their commercial. The psychology behind it the author said, was that people loved the fact that there so many women screaming for Jackson while he held the pepsi bottle. And the sales soared.

No doubt this has given millions of women job opportunities and sometimes more than that. Remember the very first ad with Aishwarya Rai in it? Apparently that played a huge part in her catapulting her career.

With all this background, to me it looks like the Kwality Walls ad makers and the product marketing chaps are trying to capture the teenage and adult market. And hence they are moving away from simple straight forward, fun, non-sexy adverts to out and out sexy commercial. But tell me why associate ice-cream with sex? I cannot somehow believe that teenagers and adults did not take to ice cream till they realised they could “pleasure up!” An interesting point was made by S the other day when we happened to see the hoarding on Brigade road. When I told her about my theory for the ad she said "oh that's even worse, what are they trying to say that we (adults) can only think about sex and nothing else?"

Hmmmm