Sometimes I look at an ad and think, "why did the Art Director even think of this?"
The weird oral-foot-fetishy violence of it aside, there's no game going on and nobody in the stands. So why would anyone be bothered by their cheers?
I'm guessing that this is another example of a vanity ad, not actually appearing in any paid media or necessarily approved by the client, submitted for creative awards shows. Sad.
On Monday, I blogged about this really distasteful "borrowed interest" of Pakistani teen activist Malala Yousafzai's near-fatal shooting and recovery to sell mattresses in India.
A couple of days later, the whole campaign disappeared from Ads Of The World. But it was too late. The PR damage to Ogilvy, India, was apparently already done.
Just now, on Twitter:
We would like to apologize to Malala Yousafzai and her family. Our official statement can be found here. http://t.co/DgGPz6gK33
— Ogilvy & Mather (@Ogilvy) May 15, 2014
The recent Kurl-On ads from our India office are contrary to the beliefs and professional standards of Ogilvy & Mather and our clients.
We deeply regret this incident and want to personally apologize to Malala Yousafzai and her family. We are investigating how our standards were compromised in this case and will take whatever corrective action is necessary. In addition, we have launched a thorough review of our approval and oversight processes across our global network to help ensure that our standards are never compromised again.
It's just one more example of how global brands (including ad agency ones) are exposed to risk when regional partners do something that contravenes the sensibilities of the internet. More strategic and creative oversight is clearly needed.
Exhibit A: Ogilvy India's exploitation of Nobel Peace Prize nominee Malala Yousafzai, and the brave outspokenness that almost got her killed by terrorists, to sell mattresses.
Update: The Malala ad is no longer on AOTW. The Ghandi and Jobs ads are still there.
Update 2: Now they're all gone. Spec work? Angry client?
Update 3: It was real, and Ogilvy has apologized.
Advertising safer sex products in India can be difficult, because as India.com points out, "When it comes to ‘sex‘, it’s still a taboo."
In an attempt to reach young people despite their elders' prudery. Durex hired popular actor Ranveer Singh to do a completely over-the-top rap number about how good it feels to use the product:
The YouTube page quotes Mr. Singh: "I believe intimacy is never just physical, but emotional too. I'd like very much for the youth of the nation to talk more openly about safe sex by normalizing the conversation."
The video may not be helping the status of women, by surrounding the man with a legion of barely-dressed female dancers, but it gets attention and it's memorable.
Buzzfeed's Rega Jha shared this ad by Tansishq, an Indian jewellery brand. She explains that while marriage is a common theme for these types of ads, the idea of showing the second marriage of a woman with a child is unusual:
"This is remarkable for a nation where widow remarriage, although legal, is still not completely accepted, and divorce and remarriage, while on the rise, are still highly stigmatized."
Ms. Jha says that at the end, the girl asks her new stepfather if she can call him "daddy".
The ad is pretty over-the-top in its sentimentalism to Western eyes, but the Twitter comments gathered in the post congratulate the advertiser for showing a "dusky" bride (played by Priyanka Bose) who "isn't stick skinny" and who has a child.
Delhi Police have apologized and withdrawn an ad promoting vocational training for street children, after criticism that it promotes child labour.
The Huffington Post reports that the Delhi Commission for Protection of Child Rights found the ad "in bad taste and diminishing the 'dignity and worth' of children, who are our future citizens.” They added, “This advertisement depicts a vulnerable child as a future criminal... besides, teaching a child how to chop an onion does not really do justice to a child.”
Child labour is a huge problem in India, but some saw even worse things in the ad. Juvenile justice expert Ananth Asthana told Indian Express, "It only shows the trivial thinking of Delhi Police on child rights. The authorities have a very wrong perception about juveniles, and this particular ad associates them with murder."
Ball gags?!? This is part of a bizarre campaign, by JWT India, for a Ford with lots of trunk space.
The other executions show Michael Schumacher with rival drivers tied up in the back, and Paris Hilton having kidnapped the Kardashians.
Really weird and disturbing. I'm surprised the Ford brand is good with this.
Update: The ads were really created by Ford's Indian AOR, but were not ever approved.
Ford and its ad agency issued apologies for a tasteless Ford Figo ad — in which former Italian PM Silvio Berlusconi is shown with a bunch of gagged and crying women in the trunk of his car — that was never meant to see the light of day.
It turns out a young creative team at JWT India, Ford Figo's agency of record, made the spot and posted it to website Ads of the World without approval. (It has since been removed.)
Ford and WPP Group (owner of JWT) have nonetheless issued formal apologies.
Update 2: Not just the work of renegade creatives, apparently. Adland writes that "Bobby Pawar, JWT India's chief creative officer & managing partner, as well as Vijay SimhaVellanki, creative director at Blue Hive, a WPP unit dedicated to managing the Ford business, have been asked to resign."
The submission on Ads of The World says "JWT, Gurgaon, India" but I have to give the J. Walter Thompson Company the benefit of my skepticism. The campaign is courting controversy in such a ham-fisted and immature way.
Above, the Vancouver Stanley Cup Riot (mistakenly labelled "Football Riot") stands in for what Charles Mackay coined as "the madness of crowds". As an ad concept, it's tenuous at best, contrasting the idea of "individual travel plans" against mob mentality.
But the creative team of Bobby Pawar, Priti Kapur, Sayantan Choudhury, Sumeer Mathur
and Sumonto Ghosh didn't stop there.
They decided to go after American anti-abortionists:
Dog fights:
Toddlers in Tiaras:
Gun obsession:
And racism:
Pretty ballsy social commentary, but what does it have to do with selling travel? All I get out of it is that Indian tourists should avoid North America at all costs. (Interestingly, Chariot India "journeys of discovery to India, Nepal and Bhutan, in South Asia," so maybe that was the idea all along.)
To me, this is another example of belief in the stupid old adage that there's "no such thing as bad publicity". There is... for brands. It's the creative teams and agencies that really benefit from these "edgy" campaigns, as the ad community congratulates them for convincing someone else to pay for another self-serving attempt at notoriety.
The Indian obsession with skin tone always baffles me. The country is home to a variety of skin bleaching products (even for intimate areas) and Bollywood stars are inevitably fair.
Even when advertisers are trying to do something good, they use fairer complexion as a symbol of success. These ads for an eye hospital that does free work for the "poor" shows the recipients with patched clothes, dark skin and wavy hair, while the benefactors are pale, well-dressed and straight-haired.
How can a hamburger chain survive in a culture where beef is taboo for 80% of the population? Easy — go vegetarian.
McDonald's India, which already has lots of meatless items on its menu, is opening a vegetarian-only location near the Golden Temple in the Sikh holy city of Amritsar in northern India. (Although some Sikh people eat meat, the consumption of it is prohibited near the temple.)
So what will they serve there? BBC says McDonald's India's signature dish in the country is the McAloo Tikki burger, which accounts for 25% of total sales. Based on the traditional snack, aloo tikki, it uses a spiced potato fritter as a patty.
McDonald's India also has a veggie burger made with a fried bread, potatoes, peas and carrot patty, and a "McSpicy Paneer" that is — literally — a cheeseburger. (The patty is all cheese.)
It ain't health food, but some of it sounds pretty good.
With time women have excelled phenomenally in every sphere of life and are over-active and conscious about the choices they make. 18 Again is a step towards strengthening women empowerment.
Somebody actually typed those words on the 18 Again YouTube channel with a straight face.
Watch this goofy musical ad, and just feel the empowerment:
18 Again is very effective for tightening of the Vagina. Along with tightening, it provides vaginal rejuvenation, improves strength and grip of vagina, helps prevent infections, encourages natural lubrication, masks foul odour, reduces involuntary urine escape, improves blood circulation, enhances delays effects of ageing and keeps the vagina healthy.
According to Dr Mahindra Vatsa, gynaecologist and sex counsellor, this kind of mentality is largely because our traditional values are still strongly embedded in us. "One of the most common questions I get, till date, is 'How do I know that my bride or girlfriend is a virgin?' The only answer that I have to such questions is that there is no way to know," says Dr Watsa.
Oh, but 18 Again has the answer: you just need to be tight like a virgin, not like sleeve of wizard:
Check by placing a finger in your vagina and squeezing inner muscles around it. If you do not feel enough tightening pressure or very less pressure around your finger, you have loose vagina.
...and in that case, you are worthless to men.
So hey! Buy an, irritating, astringent cream that will do nothing but increase your anxiety and self-loathing for acting like a modern woman in a society with a cruel double standard about sexuality.
I've worked with our national nurses' association, as well as done tons of healthcare branding, advertising and recruitment. If there's one thing I've learned, it's that nurses absolutely hate this shit.
Not only is the "sexy nurse" stereotype (who is always female) damaging to the dignity of all women, it is particularly insulting to a professional cadre who are universally loved for caring for us at some of our lowest ebbs. As one nurse once told me, "the first person and the last person who will touch you when you are alive, will probably be a nurse.
Don't you think she (or he) deserves better than this?
The campaign is for a disposable syringe company, claiming that re-use of syringes (gross) is the #2 spreader of HIV. I usually think of this in back-alley smack terms, but I suppose its possible that Indian hospitals sterilize and reuse glass ones. But is this a stretch in correlation?
We were looking at these in a creative meeting today, and a designer colleague said "they look like Dali". I thought she said "they look like Delhi" and I was impressed that she was so well-versed in some of the odder movements in international ad markets.
These are supposedly anti-drinking-and-driving ads. To me, they look more like anti-doing-two-bags-of-grass-seventy-five-pellets-of-mescaline-five-sheets-of-high-powered-blotter-acid-a salt-shaker-half-full-of-cocaine-and-a-whole-galaxy-of-multi-coloured-uppers-downers-screamers-laughers-and-also-a-quart-of-tequila-a-quart-of-rum-a-case-of-Ballantine-ale-a-pint-of-raw-ether-and-two-dozen-amyls-and-driving ads.
"Designed to address the problems women face in their private parts, Clean and Dry Intimate Wash offers protection, fairness and freshness. To be used while showering, its special pH-balanced formula cleans and protects the affected area, and even makes the skin fairer. Life for women will now be fresher, cleaner, fairer!"
"Do you ever feel, you know, not so bleached?"
Jezebel sums up the international reaction to this appalling product and ad quite nicely:
"...this product—which, in addition to just being fucking insane, brings up painful issues about the hierarchy of skin tone within the Indian community. As if it isn't bad enough that darker-skinned people are encouraged to stay out of the sun and invest in skin-bleaching products like Fair & Lovely, and that white actresses are being imported to play Indian people in Bollywood movies, now everyone has to be insecure about the fact that their vaginas happen to be the color that vaginas are??? Splendid! God, I was just saying the other day that my misogyny didn't have enough racism in it."
What's in a name? According to India's Albert Dali "Naming Consultants", everything.
Focussing on the naming aspect of branding, they say they do "Name Researching, Name Crafting, Name Auditing, Domain Booking, Trademarking and even Name Numerology[?]" Which are all important things to get right, in this day and age.
But back to Freddy. How much did his success really depend on his Nom de Glam? In his case probably quite a lot.
The other three examples of famous name changes in this campaign (found on Ads of The World) are Marilyn Monroe (Norma Jeane Mortenson/Baker), George Orwell (Eric Arthur Blair), and Le Corbusier (Charles-Édouard Jeanneret). For the first two, the name change was simply to invoke the personal brand they wanted to express, while Le Corbusier just wanted to sound cool. But what about Freddy?
Born in Zanzibar, ફારોખ બલ્સારા (Farrokh Bulsara) was the son of Indian Parsis — descendants of Iranian Zoroastrians who long ago settled in India. He took on the "Mercury" name around the time he named Queen. (I asume he had been going by "Freddie" for some time, as he had been living in England since age 17.)
Today, I find Freddie Mercury's ethnic and religious background fascinating. As a child in the 70s, I had no idea he was anything but ethnically British. Then again, as a prepubescent boy I didn't even know he was bi. (The '70s were like that.) While his sexuality should have been obvious, I think his ethnicity was played fairly low-key.
Which makes me wonder: would British, American, and other "Western" fans have been as entranced by a man named Farrokh Bulsara? By a name that is strange and foreign to their ears? Could he have been all that and kept his original identity? And is it evidence of perceived racism?
We'll never know. The name Mercury was his choice, and the man was going through a pretty serious identity crisis at the time. But I also wonder if he could have made a go at it, with more attention to his "exotic" background, in the 21st century.
Whoa. This dumb little ad made me think way too much. Occupational hazard.
In the age of Google, it's not uncommon to find personal or news photos stolen and used for ads in other countries. But what those unethical adpeople don't realize is that the same internet that gives them access to "free" visuals can also make their thefts very public.
Whoever designed the ad was obviously looking for a pretty, smiling, fair-complexioned face to represent the West. But they didn't check the story behind the image.
Eve Carson, the woman pictured, was a student at the University of North Carolina who was brutally murdered by Demario James Atwater (and possibly his teen accomplice) on March 5, 2008. In what was apparently a random act of violence, she was killed by repeated shotgun blasts and her car and ATM card stolen.
This act of image theft was not only unforgivably cruel to Ms. Carson's family and friends. There is also a painful irony in using the picture of a murdered American student in an ad for study abroad.
I guess it's not that different from American hot sauces that brand themselves on their ability to burn your anus, but the graphic torture scenario is somehow even more unsettling.
There are three more in this series — tear gas, cutting onions and watching a sad film. They're all at Ads of The World.
Maybe it's just me, but I hate finding other people's condom packages lying around the streets or on other public places. Mostly because it's a reminder that there may be a discarded "white balloon" nearby, and also because it's litter. I'm happy people use them. I just don't want to be reminded that people are picking up street prostitutes so close to my home and work.
That said, I get the humour in this playful ad from K Swamy BBDO, India. But why would an old married couple use one?
I do, however, love the brand name: Hindustan Lifecare Limited Moods Condoms
