These days when I am continuously watching IPL, I am unable to miss the advertisements which are integrated part of matches over TV. At the same time, I am finding how misleading these promotions can be. And it makes you feel as if advertisers find you foolish enough to deceive. Here I am providing example of couple of such advertisements running over TV these days –
Airtel
This commercial talks about impatient generation of ours. Airtel is kind of promoting that it is good to be impatient just to sell their high bandwidth service i.e. Internet Connection. The truth is that impatience is evil, be it this generation or any others in past (I agree we don’t like to wait for most of the things in our lives as compared to past generations but it doesn’t mean that we can’t wait enough for the right things to happen).
Lifebuoy
(About research of 2 buildings. One building used Lifebuoy and there was 40% increase attendance of in school going children as compared to other building – all credited to Lifebuoy. Was so funny that you can’t even find a video of this advertisement over Internet.)
It shows a research which can be dependent on multiple factors and not just a soap. If such things had worked, we might expect to come across another advertisement next month in which Dettol (another soap company) shows 50% improvement as compared to 40% improvement shown in this ad (refer to parallel war of cold-drink in advertisements in India). Or above that, another ad from a beauty soap can show 45% increase in Beauty Pageant contestants from one building as compared to other – no doubt it will definitely raise the sale for this soap in India!
Kolkata Knight Riders
An IPL team which has failed badly and even today, we all are witnessing it losing deciding match which will make it go out of tournament but thanks to its owner, a Bollywood biggie celebrity which has crafted 4 new team advertisements specially for this year’s IPL when best-bet teams in the tournament like Delhi, Mumbai and Kings XI are playing their last year advertisements. Feeling sorry for what made Shahrukh go for taking such expensive but helpless step.
Nokia
Nokia is airing only those mobiles over TV which have been least profitable for this company. Never happened to watch best selling mobiles like E71 or N85 being advertised.