Sacred Hindu vs. voluptuous TOI

Many of us would have been highly amused at the recent and on-going war of ads between the two newspapers – the venerable “The Hindu” and the king of media - “Times of India”.

Times of India has been trying to penetrate the bastion of “The Hindu” in Tamil Nadu. The marketing and brand manager would have done his 4P exercises and realized that Hindu has an image of being somewhat cerebral and therefore deemed dense by the segment eyed by TOI. This is when they came up with this ad

TOI has been getting a lot of flak on social media for this ad for being tasteless. I am not a fan of TOI but I think that this is a smart ad. TOI is not targeting the reader who wants to read an analysis of the Syrian situation or how Chavez is transforming Venezuela. The typical TOI reader is the type of reader who would read a typical tabloid in London. This is the reader who wants a twitter style news. TOI gives it to them and these readers would give attention to this ad

Coming to “The Hindu”, I have loved their response to this. If TOI had mocked the brains behind the editorials of Hindu, those same brains have come out with an aggressive ad response that completely turns around the logic of the TOI ad. These were the ads…Hilarious!!!

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Borderless - one of the best Ads ever

If I were to rate Airtel as a mobile communication service provider, I could fill a page with my rantings.

Their network seems to fail suddenly and as has happened with me, it happens just when you need it the most. Your ring tone is changed without your approval, which means that you are charged without your approval as well!!! You get a bill which seems inflated and you don’t remember making so many calls and the call centre rep always passes it on in a daymare replay of a Catch 22 situation. And just when you are planning to pay online a day before last date, their website develops glitches. As is very apparent, that’s about a 360 degree circle complaints as far as Airtel is concerned. Maybe i stick to it only because the other service providers are even worse!!!!

However, one thing that no one can take away from them is the fact that they make some of the best ads on TV...quite thought provoking and quite attention arresting. To tap into the human need of communication and turn that need into some of the most beautiful ads, Airtel according to me, can attribute a good part of goodwill that people have about them to their ads that touch a place deeper than a certain cute dog ever can.

Their latest ad is a case in point.



This can be easily termed as one of those 'ads with a social message', which it is and it’s a great marketing tool at that, which is one way to look at it. But...

If we just look at the ad from a purely aesthetic point of view, it’s fantastic in its ideation and execution. The ad obviously points to border between the Palestine and Israel but the way it has been shot, it can just be any place - from Kashmir to Cyprus.

And what is amazing about the ad is that it has packed all the subtleties in about a minute and a half. The way that the older boy cajoles the other way to pass on the wall using sign language, the way that the other boy is hesitant at first because obviously he has been taught to suspect the other side, the way that innocence wins out in the end and the glee on the faces on both the boys when the ball is kicked back.

And then the coup of the ad.

The spontaneous movement towards the fence and how when the smaller boy gets stuck in the barb wire, the elder boy lends a helping hand. The expression on their faces when they actually stand defiant of the barb wire, small rebels who just want to play with each other, is simply overwhelming. And the voice over says “There’s no wall, no barrier that can keep us apart, if only we talk to each other”. At that moment you want to forget that it’s a marketing ad. It becomes a classic in its own sense.

To the tune of the Airtel tune, composed by A R Rehman, the camera starts panning out, moving upwards, the two boys start playing football in the no-man’s land, between the barb wires, as if creating a small peaceful country of their own.

You realize after seeing a few times that a lot of thought has gone into making this ad. A point in fact is that football is taken to be the sport which has a much more of a global language than cricket, a sport that an Indian marketer might have been tempted to take as a theme. But taking football made it universal.

It’s these small things that make this Airtel ad possibly one of the best ads ever.

Hats off, Airtel!!!