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October 23 Of cardamoms and ceos and over art directors.It takes me about forty minutes to cover a distance of about eight kilometers from office to my house. While driving I like to observe every single billboard, it's entertaining because most of them are corny, and I love corny. It's hard to spot a terrible piece of work, something that is neither corny nor funny or punny or wannabe. I was almost losing hope of the existence of really trashy advertising, until I saw DNA.
Somebody thought it was a bright idea to convince people that Bangalore exists, and somehow a random newspaper called 'DNA' needs to tells us to believe in Bangalore. Not only were the lines crafted clumsily, they just don't make a point. Check out these lines- 'The fashion weeks belongs here', 'New York has traffic jams too' (Huh duh!) 'If Sepang can host a Grand Prix, why can't Bangalore?' (yeah..I really wonder why) The analogies are terrible, cardamoms to ceos, c++ to Kannada. Phew...it was really hard to pick out the 'worst' line. Which is an achievement for the writer, because I totally believe that writing something this terrible is often the hardest thing to do.
So i went online to look for the agency who worked on this landmark campaign. Turns out to be Contract, Bombay.. which made me wonder for a second, why the Bangalore branch couldn't have worked on a campaign for the city. They would have probably had a better insight of the people, and therefore not come up with trash like apples and oranges and cardamoms. The writer responsible sounded like he was actually proud of this piece of work from all his interviews. I was looking for the one who did the art. They would be brothers I think, since both the art and the copy seemed like they were from the same family of absurdity. For example, in terms of design- look at the way the headline has been placed. The size of the font in every line is different, which makes it look like an ugly heavy chunk on the right. For some reason only the ' I ' is yellow. From a distance you miss it and read only 'Bangalore'. But I know why. Art directors in general are not happy with doing a simple design. Manish must have thought...'Damn! he has come up with a hundred lines, I must do my two- bit as well'. He felt the need to contribute more than what was required. To 'over art-direct'.
Although I may not like the campaign, I find this kind of work very interesting because it sets new benchmarks. Whenever I write a lousy line, or design an ugly layout I can always say to myself...'at least It's not as bad as that'. It's comforting in an odd way. I can make fun of people i know in that agency, and I totally did, and cheap thrills as they tried to blame it on everyone else saying 'the clients made us do this'.
The other day I came across another gem of an ad for Titan made by O&M, Bangalore. The headline read 'Whales are the biggest FISH'. Now that goes straight to the Loser's Archive.
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