'ad'in 'em

Most of the regular ‘TV-watchers’ get irked by the ads that are displayed when they are trying to give their undivided attention to their favourite TV serial. On the other hand, in my case its quite the reverse. I feel apart from cricket and other sports, ads are the only things worth watching on TV (not that I don’t watch anything else).Some of the ads are so creative that its gives me a special joy to watch and understand them.

Among the ads which I appreciate, Vodafone ads rank first. Vodafone alert ads are really special and keep you guessing till the end. Some of the unforgettable ones are the guy pacing in front of the maternity ward suddenly looking into his mobile which displays “India needs 6 runs from 2 balls”, a guy spending his entire day in the elevator to the annoyance of the lift-man only because of the alert which says “you’ll meet your soul-mate in the elevator”.

The MasterCard ads which come with the tagline” there are some things money can’t buy and for everything else there is MasterCard” are really cute and one never gets tired of watching them several times.

Meanwhile, there are some other ads which I remember because they are deliberately made sound dumb (I’m being nice when I say they are deliberately made dumb… God knows, probably it was an attempt at humour that miserably failed).The “bingo” ads deserve a special mention in this category. First, it was the “vango, pongo, bingo” one which was not only dumb but had this uncanny knack of getting on to my nerves. Though the next one which involved a guy tasting “bingo” before and after an accident is not as irritating , its much more dumb.

Though the primary aim of this post was to talk about television ads, I shall digress to mention a particular a bill board ad which impressed me a lot. It was near a bus-stop I used to frequent and it read “Even in Business dailies there is a business class and an economy class ”.The joy of reading and understanding it still lingers in my heart everytime I think about it. For those of you who didn’t get it, it is a dig at Economic times by the “hindu” group which runs Business Line.