Addendum

Addendum is a fortnightly 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.

You can never win with passwords, can you? If you want to use something you can remember, it’s too vulnerable because it is simple; a little more complex, it’s taken, and when you finally frame a password that has numbers, capital letters, special characters and the whole nine yards (almost literally), it’s too difficult to remember.

IndusInd Bank has a new TVC by RK Swamy BBDO for its mobile banking business, ‘Fingerprint Banking’. It stars Farhan Akhtar and Boman Irani, but the hero of this ad is the fingerprint recognition system that does away with the need for the password. Akhtar is the yuppie who has an account with the bank and Irani, Akhtar’s older friend who cannot remember his password and immediately resolves to get himself an account at IndusInd because his own bank does not offer this facility. The ad is effective – it entertains and the message comes through straight enough. Irani’s acting sparkles.

IndusInd has a fun feature on its website called rippassword, commemorating the password’s death. All this is very well, but let’s hope the fingerprint recognition works. This writer used the same feature on her computer and it had to be taken to the dealer to be unlocked!

It all stays in the wash

Buy a really nice/expensive/delicate piece of clothing and you will most likely wash it by hand, never in the machine, for fear of damaging it. Bosch has tapped into this behaviour for its TVC about its washing machines’ Variodrum technology that claims to give such clothes a thorough cleaning without hurting a fibre.

The ad made by BBDO Singapore features a couple, the man exercising on his stationary cycle, the woman sorting clothes for the wash. He expresses dismay at her putting his new and expensive shirt into the machine. It will go out of shape, he tells her. She retorts, pointedly saying that if anything is going out of shape in the room, it’s not the shirt.

Touched to the quick, the overweight and paunchy man defends himself saying he’s been spinning on the bike for six months, to which the woman says the shirt has been doing the same too, and nothing has happened to it. The gentle humour brings the point across quite well and the male actor is a treat to watch.

A pen name, this!

If one can get over pondering why South Indians are the butt of so many jokes and stereotyped in so many depictions, this ad for Cello Butterflow pens might raise a laugh. It has a character, read caricature, with a ’70s wig and a big black mole, reminiscent of villains and comedians of yesteryear, reeling off his name at some office to some official who faints in exhaustion at its length. Turns out his parents decided on Bala when he was born but the father went on adding name after name to the birth certificate because writing with the pen was so effortless.

The singsong string of names had the South Indian writer of this piece guessing which areas of the very diverse South these very diverse names were taken from!

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