What I've liked: As they say, there's a time for everything. A time to reap, a time to sow . . . and to add, a time for good ads and a time for terribly ordinary ads. It's a cyclical phase I hope and soon enough a time will come when I will not be scared to switch on the TV for fear of being assaulted ten times during one programme with an extremely boring ad!
This brings me to a question that has been haunting me these days -- won't the constant hammering of an extremely ordinary ad turn your customer away from your product? Why has media exposure taken precedence over imaginative work?
The 90-second Vimal Suitings ad in 1990 had just six exposures to make it one of the most recalled ads for that year in the industries rating. Clearly, recall does not hinge on repetition. It is what captures the imagination that gets remembered.
So in this desert stretch that we seem to be going through, where foreigners eat raw green chillies to 'prepare for India' and other such far-fetched excursions in advertising creativity, one not-so-pedestrian ad comes to mind -- the latest one for Pepsodent. It's the one where three little kids discuss what they want to be when they grow up.
One wants a chocolate factory, the other responds by opting for dentistry to treat all the bad teeth the chocolate might produce and third, the smartest, wants to be a mom to teach her children how to live wisely!
I like it because it is sweet, simple and a slightly more interesting take on an otherwise very ordinary product -- toothpaste! Seeing the world through the eyes of a child always makes everyday life far more fun than it actually is and to use this route was quite a novel way of saying the same old story.
What I've learned: Finding common ground
That no man is an island must be the most cliched truth of all, yet when it comes to our own lives, a vast majority behaves like it has never heard of this. It is a given fact that all of us need each other to get just about anything done in our lives, yet we cling to our own viewpoint as a drowning man to a straw, rather than admit that the other person might have some merit in his!
The futility of this attitude defies all comprehension but still it must be the most popular stance taken when there are differences of opinion. Even for something as homely as a daughter-in-law/mother-in-law confrontation.
The daughter-in-law believes (and she is probably right) that the practices that she was brought up with are the best and the mother-in-law believes that hers work best. And therein lies the rub. Neither side is willing to come to find a common ground -- that a little bit of yours and a little bit of mine could go a long way.
It's the same scene played all over again when a new person joins a firm. Despite the fact that he has left his old firm, he thick-headedly holds on to his old beliefs convinced that they have more value than those of the company he has joined, not realising that it is what constitutes their success formula that he had admired from afar!
And on the employer's part too, there seems to be a tendency to disregard the recipe that went into the making of their high profile recruit when they found him alluring enough to want him on board!
This inability to respect everything about each other is what stands in the way of a beautiful spot in the middle, usually called common ground.
That oasis in the midst of finger-pointing and fault-finding, that calm spot where you are willing to open your mind and take the good along with what you believe is bad, is the place that all successful people work from. Taking up pole positions only tears the fabric apart, pulling together is the only way forward, if forward is the way you want to go!
