AD-VICE and AD - VERSA

I’m the kind of person who watches ads on TV (and reads them in newspapers and magazines) with avid interest.

Recently, two ads for Cadbury’s Chocolates caught my interest, although for totally opposing reasons.

The TVC for Cadbury’s Dairy Milk showing a crowd of people on a railway station intently watching a nail-biting cricket match is really, really funny and bang-on observant:

It pokes fun at our cricket-obsession. Only a sari-clad woman in a tea-stall is unaffected by the match. All the others are glued to the TV, including the seller hawking Dairy Milk bars in a tray – he foolishly, if magnanimously, offers free bars if India wins.

India doesn’t, as happens so very often (in real life, that is). They lose in the very last ball to the unfancied Kenyans. Again, a wonderfully satiric take-off on the irresistible, if irritating, predilection of the Indian team to lose almost-won matches with monotonous regularity.

After the deflating defeat, the crestfallen crowd is cheered by a young boy, determined not to miss out on the free-chocolate offer. He asks the vendor to give the promised treat because “koi toh jeet gaya” (at least somebody has won). Accurate child psychology and karmic philosophy, that.

And finally the hilarious exit lines – the bewildered vendor, finding his chocolates disappearing at an alarmimg rate (Indians love freebies) amidst much cheering and shouting of “Kenya jeet gaya” (Kenya has won - Indians celebrate at any and every excuse), timidly asks “Yeh Kenya hai kidhar?” (Where is this Kenya?). And the self-satisfied, smug-ly ignorant average monkey-capped middleclass Indian (for whom Kenya is a name that rhymes with Babua and his ilk, common nicknames in INDIA) answers, “Idhar hi toh tha…gaya hoga kidhar” (He was here only…must have gone somewhere). Totally brilliantly ridiculously witty.

NOW, can anybody tell me how this same company can come up with the extremely INANE and sick-making ad about their Celebrations range of chocolates, where a precocious young boy offers his sister a box of gift-wrapped chocolates, saying it is a book. And the girl – the ASININE, BIRD-BRAINED TWIT – actually turns down her mouth in disappointment! How SILLY is that? I do realize that many young children do feel that books are useless, but does the ad (and the company, and the agency, and, by extension, the viewer) really have to endorse that view?

I felt so, so disappointed and disgusted, especially since my expectations were raised by the terrific Dairy Milk ad.