The joy of gifting

This week, Sravanthi Challapalli reviews the latest ads.

There’s a new ad by Titan using the gifting theme and it’s heartwarming. A professor who’s writing something on the board hears something and turns back to look at the class. He stares in growing incomprehension as a few start tapping on their calculators, then begin pounding their fists on the desks, bobbing their heads, and making music with their stationery, not sparing even the scissors, and was that a ruler or a piece of laminate stripped off the desk? By now it’s clear that this is all part of a plan. The singing commences, with the rest of the class joining in bit by bit. A few more staff members walk in, a student approaches him with a book saying Farewell Professor with a collection of photos inside, and as he flips through the pages, he finds a Titan watch set into a hollowed-out portion of the book. See the ad for yourself to appreciate how superbly Avijit Dutt portrays the overwhelmed professor.

That’s not all. The music that the students make with their fists, desks, calculators, and their voices – with no musical instruments involved – is an ‘a capella’ rendering of Titan’s signature composition. Composer Michael McCleary put it together. In all, this one-minute ad, directed by Prakash Verma for Ogilvy India, is quite a performance!

Active promise

What strikes me at first is how the camera captures the crumbs dispersing as the biscuit is broken into two. If there's one word to describe the new ad for the relaunch of Sunfeast Marie Light made by Draftfcb+Ulka, it's pleasant. And light, much like the claims the product makes.

It's very much in the manner of past advertisements made for the brand. The young-ish parents have sat down to an evening cuppa and Sunfeast while the children are playing. After a couple of bites, the parents too join in the revelry, come rain or sunshine. In this ad, the children are playing shuttle badminton when the shuttlecock gets trapped in the tree above. They appeal to their parents to recover it for them. The mother is initially reluctant but she's a couple of biscuits down and so sportingly wields the bat to knock it down and is drawn into a game. The imagery of the biscuit and the wheat has been retained.

What really makes a difference, and a positive one, is the music. The lyrics are much the same, conveying the benefits of Eat Light, Live Light (Light Khao, Light Raho) but the pace is faster and the voices are new. I will be humming it for a while.

Old wine, new bottle

Deepika Padukone is the new Lux woman, and Imran Khan the new Lux man. The ad is a fairly routine – I must say that – seduction scene with smouldering looks and smiles, easily pulled off by the two actors, but what I liked about it was the computer graphics.

I loved how the pinkness of the soap virtually blooms into a thousand petals to envelop Deepika in its many folds, conveying the ‘soft and smooth’ promise. The ad, made by JWT, is helped along by the remix of yesteryear favourite Roop Tera Mastana which featured Rajesh Khanna and Sharmila Tagore.

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