Here’s a desktop calendar made out of one of my recent photographs (as you can see above) – for the month of July.
Just click on the thumbnail below, right click on the big image that opens and click on “Set as Desktop Background…” (Firefox) or “Set as background” (Internet Explorer).
Stay on top for the coming month…
Courtesy the brilliant folks at bighugelabs & flickr
Which do you think makes a better connect with you, or whom would you buy from?
We are your only choice
The only company selling blah-blah with blah-blah technology.
We are the only option if you want blah-blah on your blah-blah.
(In other words, if you want blah-blah and not choose us, you’re doomed. Where will you go, eh?)
or
We appreciate your choice
We are equipped with blah-blah on our blah-blah, but we appreciate that you have a choice of going to other people but have chosen us.
We appreciate that you have chosen us amongst many others who are giving similar (not the same) offerings.
(In other words, we are better, because you chose us; The blah-blah on the offering might be just one of the reasons you did.)
This is my first time ever in Hyderabad and around 10 years since I last visited the southern part of India. Looks different, but everyone here can speak Hindi, albeit with the Hyderabadi flavour.
Enter www.google.co.in (or just .com if you’re in India) in your browser’s address bar. And you see this:
and then, this:
Has the online Almighty , Google fallen to Chinese/Japanese miscreants?
While I’m writing this, the problem remains. To still use Google, you can use the .co.uk and .com.au.
—
8.14PM IST: the problem seems to have been resolved, and Google India is working again.
See here, this:
http://walkernewsdownload.googlepages.com/mediaplayer.swf
A TV spot for Frankfinn air-hostess training institute. Well-made, well-executed, but it’s a surprise everytime the ad ends, because apart from the last vignette there is nothing to indicate that it is talking about an air-hostess training institute.
Why are you talking about girls being themselves, not caring about the world, about their individuality, in an ad for an institute training girls for the stereotypical female profession?
Plus the brands that have been using the air-hostess aspiration on Indian television lately have been all the stereotypical female ones: fairness creams etc.
In my opinion, the entire spot fails to connect with the brand being advertised.
My take is that this ad will build recall, but not for the brand, but just for itself. I don’t think that is what any marketer wants for her communication, or does she?
enjoy 🙂
The tortoise did not win the race. The hare lost it. The tortoise is a winner only because his competitor was an idiot — who was complacent and slept off.
There is a take-away in the story. But it is not that “slow and steady wins the race”. It is that “no matter how skillful you are, never underestimate your competitor”, and “if slow and steady could win the race, think what fast and steady can do”.
If the hare had not slept off, the tortoise would not have been celebrated. Slow and steady wins the race only when fast and steady isn’t around.
For the last six months, I have been seeing TV spots by this one advertiser: V-Guard, who claims that this is a name you can trust.
Pretty tall claim for someone about whom I don’t know anything – not what they make, not what they sell, not where they are from, not who the chairman/CEO is, not even an idea of the broad sector or field they are in. Since their ads have been on TV, they have not talked about any of these things once. All I see is “V-Guard: the name you can trust”. Yeah, you wish.
Pretty clumsy way to be bit by the “build the brand, not sell the product” bug.
So you’re the biggest, friendliest, most exotic, most democratic, most aristocratic company selling the nicest, brightest, darkest, blackest, tastiest, nastiest, most effective, most stylish product in the fastest, loudest, most innovative, most unobtrusive, most traditional way. But are you the most popular company?
Well, I came across an advertisement of one company which claimed to be the most popular in its category. And if I’m not mistaken, the category is not a niche one either.
So how come if you’re the most popular company in your category, you need to advertise, and advertise that you’re the most popular, while I already know your competitor and I read your name for the first time in that advertisement of yours.
Bottomline is: do you think long and hard enough before framing and publishing your marketing communication? Does it make sense to you? Would it make sense to anyone who’s reading it? Don’t give me the faff about TG here – if your message is out there, it will be read, analyzed, criticized and ripped apart by anyone who sees it. Are you prepared for that?
I love Tata Sky. They keep making ads that I can keep writing about.
First they claimed to revolutionize home entertainment, never mind that what they are providing is just improved signal fidelity on what the local cable guy anyway has been providing us for decades now, with an ad depicting people throwing out every home entertainment device they had (including television sets??!!??). Then they thought that a man dressed in grass along with a Hrithik Roshan was a funny way to depict the public’s affinity with cricket. Then it was the cartoons trying to bundle a Tata Sky box with a television set in an unbreakable bond. Never mind that those who threw out their TVs after seeing the first spot are still wondering where the picture appears on the new Tata Sky box they bought. Then it was the education campaign with the little Einstein spots – which was cute and made a good connect. And somewhere in between were the nice, simple and classy endorsements by the likes of Boman Irani and Kiron Kher – remember them standing on a stage in front of curtains reading a feedback letter in a microphone? Then came the 1500 /1499 kasamm se ad, which was hilarious and made an instant connect.
I thought they were improving. Then suddenly, we hear a jingle – “inke saath rahne ka raaz…” in an ad targetting family with choice-led togetherness (!!??!!) And after boring us with that irritating ad in a variety of lengths, they are back with the education focus. After that lengthy intro, let me describe the ad to you.
A kid who is happy to see bubbles, a ferris wheel and to get quite a handful of lollipops comes to share his glee with his father. In each case, the father connects the kid’s activity with some facet of education – like “colors batao…”, “ginke batao…”, “shape batao…”. Every time the kid gets a little disappointed and sad, and finally breaks out into tears.
A voiceover tells us all that kids should have fun in order to learn. Ergo, we should all take a Tata Sky to let our kids learn while having fun.
But I thought learning how to count was more fun if I was counting real soap bubbles rather than counting with a badly-designed interface with numbers in comic sans! 🙂 And learning about shapes was more fun and done better with seeing shapes in real life. And that making the child learn in the real world is preferable to binding your child to the “idiot-box”.
And anyways, the child in the ad was not crying because he found this way of learning wrong, but because he did not want to learn while he was having fun. So what are the odds that he would like to “learn” with the television? The “solution” proposed by the ad is not really a solution, it just transfers the problem from outdoors to indoors.
Thanks to Tata Sky for reminding us that the public are idiots…