One beautiful girl is standing on a balcony and munching chips. It looks like she is eagerly waiting for someone. Then the camera focuses on the balcony on the opposite side. One young lad appears there. The girl looks at her watch and agonizes her anger. The young guy holds his ear and silently submits. Till this point, we can correlate it with any love story that we often experience in our neighbor or cinema. But what happens after this, is quite unusual. The girl gives a flying kiss and it widens its wings to fly like a butterfly and lands in the pocket of the charming chap. It causes a fire in his pocket.
The above scenes are from an advertisement of popular chips. Without going into the underlying message of the advertisement, I must say that the advertisement is as attractive as an amusing scene in a movie. The young generation may be attracted by watching the advertisement but would be totally unaware about its impact on the health and pocket pinch.
In fact, there is huge effort and costs are spent behind each and every advertisement every year as it drives the company performance to a great extent. We do always see a mixture of Beauty, Brilliance and Bravery in most of the advertisements. Let us consider one of the recent creative advertisements. This has been put in one of the malls in Mumbai. This mall is having life size poster of the people on the sliding doors. And as you step toward the sliding entrance, the door opens up and the life size poster of the people move away from you as if they are trying to avoid the close proximity with you. Once you enter inside the mall, you see a poster “People Move Away when you Have Body Odour”. This looks very simple yet having significant impression on the shoppers.
We have many advertisements coming on the Televison, which are quite innovative, informative and interesting. I can’t forget the advertisement of Cadbury Chocolates, Fevicol, Minto Fresh ; too many to list. While watching movie in Televison, I often get confused by the frequency of the advertisement as to whether my plan was to watch Movie or the advertisements. But since the time advertisement has become a mean of enjoyment, excitement and entertainment, I love watching both the advertisement and the movie. But I found out the tormenting truth of late that it takes out a substantial time of our daily time, which could have been utilized a more productive way.
Now let us travel in time machine for couple of minutes to go back in the past and see what the history of advertisement is. Egyptian used papyrus to make Sales messages and wall papers. As the economy expanded during the 19th century, advertising grew alongside. In June 1836 French newspaper La Press was the first to include paid advertising in its page, allowing it to lower its price, extend its readership and increase its profitability. In the early, 1920, the first radio stations are established. The radio station owners soon realized they could earn more money by selling sponsorship rights in small time allocations to multiple businesses. This practice was carried forward by Television in the late 1940s and early 1950s. The late 1980s and early 1990s saw the introduction of cable television and particularly M TV. Marketing through the internet opened new frontiers for advertisers and contributed to the “dotcom” boom of the 1990s.
Every year, the companies spend billions of dollars across the globe. The main purpose of advertisement is to persuade an audience to purchase or take some actions upon products, ideas or services. The marketing mix is the key concept of all these advertisements. The marketing mix was suggested by Jeremy McCarthy, professor at Harvard business school. The marketing mix consists of four basic elements called the four Ps. Product is the first P representing the actual product, price represents the process of determining the value of a product. Place represents the variable of getting the product to the consumer like distribution channels, market coverage and movement organization. The last P stand for promotion, which is the process of reaching the target market and convincing them to buy the product. Advertisement mainly banks upon a main theme. For example, remember the punch line “Boost is the secret of my energy” or “International Soap of the heroines”. However, it is left to the onus of the consumers whether they will really become enviously energetic by drinking boost or become charismatic Karishma Kapoor after using the soap.
While advertising can be seen as elemental and essential for economic growth, it is not without social costs. Unsolicited commercial emails and other forms of spam have become so prevalent and predominant as to have become a major nuisance to the user of these services. You would often see mails that would state that you have won a lottery of million dollars and just need to claim. First time, I became very excited and replied back thinking that I will be millionaire in few more days.
Advertising is increasingly invading public space, such as schools, which can be considered and condemned as a form of child exploitation. In addition, advertising frequently uses psychological pressure on the intended consumer. Think about the Dish Tv advertisement by Shahrukh Khan with a message “Thoda jada Wish Karo, Dish Karo” i.e. Wish more and bring Dish. But the wish does cost a hole in your pocket. And if you have already a hole, there is no point of wishing more. But it is equally true that we can not think life without advertisement. Advertisement is the point of information to us. We can exploit it as we want or we can let it exploit us. The choice is ours.
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