Slice of lime.

Quite likely I'm totally off the mark here. But I'm beginning to seriously doubt the indiscriminate inclusion of celebrity in ads in the cinema hall and on tv. I suspect it takes away some of the credibility of the message intended to be delivered, especially when the approach is slice-of-life. Take the well-made ad currently being aired for Tata Sky+. Aamir Khan is trying to put his wife (played not by his real-life wife but a dimply Gul Panag)
into a good frame of mind. He has made the morning tea, cooked breakfast just the way she likes, cleaned up the fridge and so forth just so she will allow him to watch cricket match slated for the evening even if it clashes with her favourite soap. Obviously they have just one tv set. I don't believe it. To me, they look like a two- or multiple-tv family, who would also have at least a live-in maid. Ergo, the bone of contention should simply not exist. Only if the viewer is a born cretin or has just arrived from Mars to believe the couple depicted is a typical middle class, upwardly mobile couple, then it will work. A modest apartment as the setting and a non-celebrity cast would've helped belief. http://digbig.com/4xwra.
I guess our tv watcher today is too astute and savvy. She can tell when Aamir Khan is not Aamir Khan. The trouble with the Indian star system is that, in every movie, we tend to think of the star as herself/himself. If we are telling the story to a friend, we refer to the characters by the name of the star. Remember how in most of his hits of his heydays Amitabh Bachchan used to be named Vijay? On the other hand, there is a currently running tv ad featuring Saif Ali Khan, Shah Rukh Khan and Kareena Kapoor which lets them be celebs and uses a real-life relationship intelligently and believably.

My life as an ‘art’ movie buff. (Snigger, snigger.)

The trouble with being in advertising – and that too in an ad agency that was a successor to the one where Satyajit Rai had once worked as an art director http://popgoestheslop.blogspot.com/2006/06/whose-wife-was-she-anyway_27.html – is that you’re bound sometime or other to deceive yourself into imagining that you’re a movie aficionado par excellence. In my case, I happened to get into my profession at a time when the Indian art movie movement was just about beginning. NFDC was up and running. (I remember seeing Bhuvan Shome, the Mrinal Sen-NFDC movie made in 1969, at Dreamland, a hop, skip and a jump away from 233 Khetwadi Main Road. An NFDC Film List is here: http://www.geocities.com/curlybraces/movies/hindimovies.htm. ) Film societies were sprouting all over. On top of it, I had also deluded myself into believing that ad writing was an art. Ergo, I was an artist. When I first joined Clarion in 1965, I used to wear a shirt with a tie. By the time I became a senior writer in a couple of years, I had switched to jeans and khadi kurtas. I also took to visiting art galleries, craft shops like Contemporary Arts & Crafts (I used to buy fairly inexpensive artifacts from this shop at the time located on the first floor of a musty old building with wooden flooring opposite the University on Mahatma Gandhi Road) and watching experimental plays at Tejpal like Mohan Rakesh’s Adhe Adhure. As luck would have it, I became friendly with an art director from the Clarion-McCann Calcutta office, Shyam Guha, who used to visit us from time to time on work junkets. A good raconteur, he used to regale me with his stories of Rai qua art director. I had in the meanwhile become friendly with Saeed Mirza, a fellow copywriter who later became an art movie maker. You can imagine how facilely I must have slipped into reading about and discussing genre, film noire and all that jazz including movie and play scripts published by Calder & Boyars, mostly left-of-trad stuff. Having been weaned on a diet of the standard Hindustani film and Hollywood fare – cowboy flicks, comedies, musicals, crime, cartoons – thus far, I began to abhor songs and dances and straight forward story-telling. I began to view film as art, not meant for mass entertainment but for meaningful “communication”. All this had an inevitable fall-out in my view of advertising too. I started to view it as “communication” and an adjunct to education. I started scouring for books on communication models and spouting these half-baked “received ideas” (to borrow the Gustave Flaubert phrase for “fashionable banalities”) to anyone who would be willing to listen. It amazes and amuses me now to think how many people were actually willing to listen to this new-fangled rocket science about advertising creativity. My romance with art movies and ad creativity qua rocket science ended fairly late in life. Thank my lucky stars for making the scales fall from my eyes.