Thursday, September 29, 2005

Reminiscences of Indian Ads

I am not much of a TV person per se but somehow I have this feeling that ads back home had much better appeal for me than here in the US. Just a trip down the memory lane yields me the following in no particular order for the concept part of it.

(a) Ericsson: Remember the punch line of "One Black Coffee Please..". Awesomely cool one.This one even one got the bronze lion (one of the first indian ads to make it so high on the internationally acclaimed list).
(b) Nestle Polo - The Mint with the Hole : The famed "Beta- Sweater Pehno" kind of ones always leave me laughing after its rendition.
(c) Hyundai : When they launched a new car (I believe it is the Accent model) they had this amazingly thoughtful ad which goes like this :

"Ask Anyone to draw a star"
[A Blank Black Screen hovers for less than a second]
"Most of the time you would see this"
[ The standard version of David's Star appears on the screen]
Then the screen goes blank.
[A bright sun appears tearing away the black blanket and exposing a metallic red car]
"Because Reality Differs from Perception"


Of course there is always the jingle part of it that appealed to me too.The top of the list would be the humming for Nestle Sunrise coffee followed by Rexona's initial jingle (supposedly AR Rahman's first commercial music after the initial foray into Dyanora's Madras TV Show..Remember Dyanora TV?) which would be closely followed by Chakra Gold Tea.The oldest jingle I remember is that of Close Up toothpaste's early 80's ad with a couple listening to the sound of waves in a conch. Even the relaunch of coca-cola at Taj Mahal had this oldie tune "Share my dream..share my coca-cola..always.."

Apart from this there is this particular genre of MTV ads which are in a class of their own. The spoofs, the concept is simply on a different scale to be compared to mainstream TV.

There are a lot more in this but this is just a sampler to note down ones that come to mind as cool ads.I am not sure how the scene is these days with regards to ads.

4 comments:

Priyanka said...

I remember that "Dhara" ad with the kid who goes "jaana to hai, magar bees pachees saal baad". awww. And the Cadbury's ads were always good. Amul ads (print). Oh and that "doodh-piyo glassful" one was cool. Pepsi did some great campaigns, but both Coke and Pepsi seem to have lost it totally now.
And thinking of ads from childhood- Parle G, Laxman Sylvania, Surf (with Lalita ji)..:))

I'm pretty out of touch with current advertising tho i did see that SRK lux ad, and a surf excel ad (that had a borrowed tag line i hear- "dirt is good" ). but the ad was good..

hirak said...

I still remember the Lifebuoy jingle and who can forget the Nirma girl whirling?
**
We sing the Videocon jingle on treks. It is fun!

Anonymous said...

Birth, cay, murmur, Ganti, pseudo, no due, spit, nag, rum, rum, yacht, rib.

7~

Paddy said...

[Pri and Hirak]Thanks for the add ons. I agree with every single one mentioned.

[7~] Thank you :)