Jackson and his studio had good reason to bloat The Hobbit: more movies meant more cash from fans who couldn't get enough of unlikely hairy footed heroes, easily identifiable villains and more deus ex machina than a Tamil mythological from the 1980s. We are going to ask you this in the nicest way possible, Indian advertising: what's your excuse?
Every time a new "online only" commercial makes its way to our inboxes or timelines, we groan inwardly and outwardly, knowing that's probably another four wasted minutes of our life we are never going to get back. Too many ads these days don't have very much to say, take too long saying it and then awkwardly graft a brand in somewhere during, but most often at the end of the film. It reminds us less of advertising and more of some valiant MC, at the end of a concert or a theatre performance, trying to "get a round of applause for the sponsors!" as the audience shuffles and shoves its way to the exit.
We truly are in the age of Boreytelling: maudlin narratives that wind on forever with a supposedly heartwarming final act. The most egregious offenders so far are Pepsi's 7 minute long Diwali film about a tiff between a city based woman and her aged parents.
All the other films, however dull, compare favourably with this one simply because they are shorter. And more recently an ad for Gillette about a blind old man, his son and their near 30 year long love affair with cricket which ends when the son gets married, something the elderly gent seems a little unnecessarily churlish about.
We could have sworn this ad played out in real time and left us feeling at least three decades older. What would make it slightly bearable was if the films changed things up just a little every now and then. How about something funny for a whole four minutes? Key and Peele and Mitchell and Webb, have done it on season after season of great sketch-based comedy. How about four minutes of suspense? Or action? However, for every exception like Ogilvy's 'Prison Break' for Tata Sky or McCann's stammering comedian for Nescafe, there's the rule.
An agency head we spoke to recently, wondered at how young creatives these days were so eager on scripts about making the world a better place, provided they were able to get a brand to foot the bill, of course. We reckon it could be the result of growing up on saccharine Michael Jackson anthems like 'Heal The World' or 'The Earth Song' and watching films bristling with a self-righteous need for change like 'Rang De Basanti' while in or just out of college.
However, it most likely has less to do with altruism and more with riding a trend. But in the process, the industry is dulling one of its best skills: the ability to pack a great narrative with heaps of nuance and understated detailing into an incredibly short span of time. Even worse, it's wasting the gift of length on the cinematic equivalent of hearing the local bore narrate tedious tales about the triumphs and tragedies of the dullest people in your neighbourhood.
And that's a tragedy far more poignant than any we've seen in an ad so far.
*We were initially going to call it Jackson's Disease before we realised it's becoming a common term for vitiligo: the skin condition Michael Jackson suffered from, the treatment of which resulted in him transforming from black to white. Strangely enough, we do have a few brands suffering from that as well: note the ads for the fairness category or purely desi apparel brands which hawk their wares using primarily white-skinned models. But that's another rant for another week.
0 comments:
Post a Comment