Advertising is necessary for any brand to announce itself in the market, to announce to the people of the world that it has arrived to cater to their needs, to announce to its competitors that its ready for challenge and finally to gather the much needed market percentage.
Advertising cannot afford to dish out stale, unimpressive ads on the national television. Creative ideas from the Ad honchos are very often very impressive in that, they capture the imagination of the viewer to a powerful extent and eventually leads to a successful selling of the product!
The product in question is the fuzzy orange flavoured drink Mirinda and the ad’s punchline Taste aisa chchaaye, character phisla jaaye (Tastes so good, your character hides under a hood) .
The ad opens with the scene of a mother, clad in a typical bollywood-mom-style-saree alighting from the Train, with a look on her face which conveys both overwhelming sense of a big city and an eager search for her son.
The scene shifts to the railway platform, to the devoted son who cries Maaa. Mom is more than happy to see her beloved son. Sonny boy takes mommy around the big city showing the ways & life of the city. They are happily walking hand-in-hand (in a shopping mall or some such big place). They are about to go towards an elevator, when a crowd of people come out of one. In the melee Mommy & sonny boy get separated. How mommy got stuck into the elevator can only be assumed that the waiting crowd now took mommy along with them, into the claustrophobic metal box.
Mommy now has a even more worried, terrified look on her face and tries very badly to look for her sonny boy outside the elevator. In the next scene, a kind lady security personnel escorts mommy to a waiting place, offers her a drink of fuzzy orange flavoured drink called Mirinda. Mommy take a sip from the bottle and taste enthralls her. In the blurry background can be seen the good samaritan security lady who sends out a message on the public address system.
Lo! and behold, sonny boy soon arrives, with much relief and a big grin. Good samaritan security lady, then tells mommy, maaji mirinda chodiye, aapka beta aaya hai. The taste has ensnared another victim, mommy won’t let go of the fuzzy drink, turns one look towards the freezer full of Mirinda and another look towards the sonny boy and to much amazement of mine says ’’Yeh, yeh mera beta nahin hai’’!!! with the ad’s punchline being sung is a folk-music kinda chorus.
- Was it really appropriate to depict the ad showing a mother’s love for
her child?
- Can any Mother, really forget and ostracize her son for the sake of a
drink, however tasty it might be?
- Couldn’t the ad-men have come up with some other interesting story line.
The same drink’s ad, with the same punchline of a kid taking his younger bro
for a hair cut & instead buying himself the so-called-drink, was much
better!
- Does ad campaigning need to stoop to such nadirs to promote the product?