Addendum is a weekly column that takes a sometimes hard, sometimes casual, sometimes irreverent, yet never malicious look at some of the new or recent advertisements and comments on them.

We’ve mentioned this before in these columns and we will say it once more. The long-format film has arrived. It arrived with the Google and the Gondappa films, both of which enjoyed great success in India. Who cares about Lions anyway? Now Ogilvy has done it again, this time for Adani Wilmar’s Fortune cooking oil. A full 4.5-minute film made by Curious Films, it stars a granny who trudges up several flights of stairs in a hospital to try and serve her grandson just two spoons of the dal she has made and he always loved. The obviously very ill grandson is seen stubbornly refusing to even taste the dal made in the hospital and served by an obstinate nurse who upholds the hospital’s rules that do not allow “outside” food to be served to patients.

I love the granny’s retort to the “outside food” rule. She indignantly says this is “home-made food” but that doesn’t cut any ice with the nurse. Days pass and the granny is shown pleading her case unsuccessfully. Finally Granny brings a tiffin carrier of food and says it’s the patient’s birthday and this home-cooked meal is her gift for the nurse. The nurse melts, locks the doors and allows the granny to feed the patent her “two spoons of dal”. The patient hungrily slurps up Granny’s dal.

The granny would get a ‘Best Actor’ if there was one for ad films. She is really the pivot on which the entire film revolves. Nowhere is the name Fortune mentioned nor the pack shot shown till the entire narrative is done with. A rather bold move. Somewhere down the line I almost forgot it was an ad for Fortune rice bran oil. I thought it was a stirring testimony to granny’s love.

So what’s the verdict? Will this win hearts? Well, I have mixed feelings. While this is a great film to view once, I am not sure if I could view it the third time. I could view the Google film a hundred times. And that’s where Fortune falters. A rather simplistic script held together by one person’s performance. If you want me to view 4.5 minutes again, you’d better have a lot more to offer!

Football fever makes it sober

Jabong.com has suddenly gotten very serious with the tone of its advertising. Its new TV commercial, created by Bang in the Middle, is a significant departure from its earlier advertising which was marked by screams, quite literally. This time around, Pratap Suthan has decided that football is a deadly serious sport and should be dealt with seriously. The film reaches out to those football fans who see this as so much more than just a game watched at unearthly hours (in India). And for all those fans (I hope we are not trivialising them by calling them mere fans, Pratap) there is Jabong.com with a range of football merchandise from jerseys to shoes to everything else. Wait till I tell my son this! I can then act like one of the characters in the earlier TVCs and scream.

Axis gets a move on

Remember we wrote about Deepika Padukone addressing a press conference in a TVC for Axis Bank? And remember we were struck by the silly question the reporter asked and were looking forward to the sequel to this ad with morbid curiosity? Well, we are pleased to report that the press conference is on course now and the “reporters” have been well prepped to ask pertinent questions for a change. A reporter asks Deepika when was the last time she visited an Axis Bank branch and she replies with aplomb that she was there some 19 minutes ago. But haven’t you been here all the while, asks the reporter. Deepika, pointing to her phone, explains that if one wanted to “bank” there was really no need to go there, to the bank branch. She casually points pointing to her phone, indicating that Axis offers cutting-edge technology. Now the press conference format is beginning to look good. I am sure the next question will be equally relevant to the brand.

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