These days the advertisements look dumb, stupid and idiotic. Allow me to share an example: Look at the TV advertisement of the Cadbury 5-star chocolate. Or you can also recall it, if you have seen it. Each of us must have seen the great stupid advertisement at some point or the other.
To discover how Cadbury’s Eat 5 Star, Do Nothing campaign turned a simple stupid idea into one of India’s most idiotic marketing is heart breaking. Is there a strategy to explore? Ogilvy’s lacks creativity in its approach. I wonder why nobody wrote about this before. This campaign became a benchmark in modern advertising to kill a good old brand.
A doctor, a patient attendant is taking a dead body on a stretcher in an elevator. In the same elevator there is a man who is seen eating the Cadbury 5-star chocolate. Firstly who eats a chocolate near a dead body? I did not expect the 5 star eaters to be so insensitive. It is being sub-human.
Near the dead body, this chocolate eating stupid man leaves his mobile phone, on the stretcher! Who keeps a mobile near a dead body? The phone suddenly begins to ring. The chocolate eating stupid man does not answer the phone. The attendant standing at one end of a stretcher shouts at the Cadbury 5 star eating character, in a very ugly and loud voice “Phone Utha”.
In the meantime, the dead man gets up to answer the phone while removing cotton from his nostrils. The insensitive chocolate eating man is thanked for doing nothing.
Secondly this illogical and insensitive advertisement projects lifesaving doctors as inefficient and irresponsible. Otherwise, which doctor declares a living man dead?
I think both mind & imagination are bankrupt for the craters of the advertisement.
About the Author
Dr. K. Raja Gopal Reddy is a seasoned internationally qualified Insurance professional. What you are reading here, may not answer all the questions we have, but has the absolute power of asking unsettling questions which increase the interest in the strange world, and show the contradictory wonders lying just below the surface of the commonest things of life. Look at this disturbing but beautiful thought of Friedrich Nietzsche “God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him”.
Dr. Reddy can be reached at: raja66gopal@gmail.com
