The Hindu Business Line : Funny, irreverent and inoffensive

Let’s say you need to create a TV spot for an analgesic to reduce cold sore pain and swelling. And, the client insists that the ad should be ’funny and irreverent and all that, but at the same time, not offending anybody who suffers from cold sores’.

The two things are mutually exclusive, says Joe, a character in Joshua Ferris’ novel Then We Came to the End ( www.crosswordbookstores.com). “It was one of those impossible, harebrained paradoxes that only a roundtable of corporate marketers smelling of competing aftershaves could have dreamed up.”

Yet, the agency comes up with a clincher: a Cold Sore Guy who gets to interact with everyone in the ‘family’ and thus drives home the message, ‘Don’t let cold sore interfere with your life.’

Elsewhere in the story, you’d read how the creative team turns active with ‘lay off’, that is, being let go. “We said he’d gotten the axe, she’d been sacked, they’d all be s**tcanned. Lately, a new phrase had appeared and really taken off. ‘Walking Spanish down the hall.’ Somebody had picked it up from a Tom Waits song, but it was an old, old expression, as we learned from our ‘Morris Dictionary of Word and Phrase Origins’…”

Rings true.

Third Umpire

Not Quite Cricket
Pradeep Magazine

There are several reasons for the apathy that has taken over the cricketing world, and most of these have to do with the irresponsibility and mismanagement of the BCCI, the body that controls and administers the money that is poured into the game,” writes Pradeep Magazine in Not Quite Cricket ( www.penguin.com).

The Board of Control for Cricket in India gets most of the money generated through television and the consumer goods industry, he adds. “Till the early Nineties when Doordarshan had monopoly over telecasting rights, the Board depended largely on the guarantee money from the staging associations to fill its coffers. The staging associations, in turn, made a packet from the sale of tickets and from in-stadia ads." Then came the liberalisation, and with it, satellite television and cable TV…

The author rues that while all across the cricketing world, the governance of the game is in the hands of paid professionals, in India, “it is still managed by politicians, bureaucrats, bankers, clerks, lawyers and babus.”

Neat narrative.

Pitchfork

Pitch Invasion
Barbara Smit

The 2006 football World Cup was the backdrop for a multimillion-dollar battle of the boot makers, pitting Adidas squarely against Nike, writes Barbara Smit in ’ Pitch Invasion’ ( www.landmarkonthenet.com ).

The Adidas’ ’Impossible is nothing’ campaign, orchestrated at a cost of about 250 million euros “bore all the hallmarks of a military operation.” The sports business has changed beyond recognition since the Dasslers of Adidas invented it, says Smit. “Long gone are the days when a sneaky employee could just leave a pair of boots in the locker room with a couple of banknotes.”

Informative.

D. Murali

http://BookPeek.blogspot.com

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Funny, irreverent and inoffensive