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Tuesday, May 1, 2012




http://www.rantsfromamadman.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/AsSeenOnTV.jpgCreative commercials and Advertising Industry


Ogilvy and Mather (O&M), the top rated advertising agency of the country had a tough task in hand in year 2007 to announce the entry of its client firm ‘Vodafone’, which had recently entered in the Indian market with the “Hutch is now Vodafone” campaign. The advertising firm took the task with all edges and came up with the most successful and most entertaining TV commercial of the year 2007; remember the Zoo Zoo’s for the Vodafone – the eggshell like character telling a new Value Added Service (VAS) story each time. The TV commercial was at the top of the list of ‘top 10 advertisements’ of the year 2007 and was the talk of the town during the second season of IPL (Indian Premier League).


The main reason behind the success of this TV commercial was the special creativity put into this low cost commercial. Though the advertisement was of low cost budget yet it was successful in delivering the message in clear and exact form. Unlike its competitors, there were no valuable brand ambassadors but still the commercial was highly successful in grabbing the attention of huge base of audience.

Every TV commercial that we watch, whether it is Cadbury GEMS funny commercial with ‘no umar for lalluch’ tagline or Coca-Cola’s emotional ‘Open happiness’ campaign; is a result of complete creativity. Though some of the commercials have come under a severe criticism from many spheres for many reasons; like the AXE deodorant’s commercial has been under clouds of criticism in India for its obscene & poor content or Vodafone’s  commercial in which it has shown a dubious chemistry between two teenagers has been highly criticized on the name of teenage UA content. And some TV commercials fail in communicating the message to the targeted customers. You can recall the AXE deodorant TV commercial that was shown frequently during this year’s addition of Cricket ASIA cup. In addition to being an obscene advertisement, the commercial has completely failed promoting its main message or generating any good response. Poland based advertising agency, Ammirati Puris Lintas Warzana, who was behind this campaign has failed to understand the social cultural values of India. But even after all this, almost all the TV commercials are a picture of creativity planned with a pinch of entertainment, fun, or emotions.

Few years back, the TV commercials were nothing more than a smartly crafted interruption to our favorite movie, reality show, or to a live game or cricket or football. But the truth is a different story altogether. Advertising is one of the key activities for potential business and is equally important as producing something using raw materials, or as capital, human resources, etc. Publicizing that the business offers to the targeted customer is called advertising, which forms the integral part of marketing, and an essential pre-condition for selling.

The advertising companies in India use multifaceted talents and ideas to carryout successful campaigns for their potential clients. With the advent of radio, TV, print, outdoor, and more recently the web, the advertising industry has been able to gain much potential and growth. By an outlook analysis in the year 2010, advertising industry was valued at a rich value of es `
– 13, 200 crore, and is expected to grow by 23% this year from the corresponding figures of the last year.

Come what may, the advertising industry is certainly revolving around a mature and creative sphere. The Industry in TV media is coming up with new creative commercials during every sort of event like IPL 5, reality shows, screening of blockbuster movies, etc, to tap a huge base of targeted customers. The Indian industry is also making enormous use of social, print, or outdoor media to generate responses using viral or surrogate forms of marketing. Advertising agencies spend a whooping `-2,000 crore every year to carry different creative, innovative, and sometimes confusing advertisements.

Tuesday, April 24, 2012

Secure your online privacy


Long time back when one of my friends told me about Internet, I felt that it may be something related to ‘not my type’ of things. For me, sending e-mail or internet browsing was something that only rich or the professional IT literate people can only talk about. But, things have changed drastically. Our status which was offline 24x7 a decade ago is now online 24x7. From desktop PC to palm tops, Analog phones to highly digital modems, cell phones to smart phones, laptops to i-pads or cassette audio players to i-pods, life has really changed. We can proudly say that we all live in the digital world. Smart TV is just an addition to this innovative list.

Like hardware, software world has also made a huge leap since its origination. And if we talk about the world of Internet then the definition isn’t different at all. Google is our guru now. It is the worlds biggest search engine and it can really search anything for us. Just insert a search string in Google and you will be presented with not less than hundred of results matching the search string. Early morning at 6 am, I don’t sip the first drop of coffee but I just read through the e-copy of my favorite Greater Kashmir daily newspaper.

The place where I live in is a 1500+ populated backward village with most of the people engaged in farming or other village level activities. Compared to the adjacent areas, my village has really low literacy rate. But surprisingly the ratio is high when you talk of people who have an account in one the many available social networking sites (mostly Facebook).  Even I can see students of primary classes having an account in Facebook. The statistics are surely going to be high if we will talk of towns or cities.

Although this gives a sign of change in the peoples mindset but it does pose a threat to a user who has almost no knowledge of online privacy. Like real life this virtual world also poses millions of threats to the privacy of individual users. Not only the social networking sites but almost every kind of online activity poses multiple threats to the user privacy and this all happens because of the collection of data. Information technology (IT) makes it technically and economically feasible to collect, store, integrate, interchange and retrieve data and information quickly and easily. However, this power of Information technology can have a negative effect on the right to the privacy of every individual. For example, personal information is being collected about individuals’ every time they visit a site on the World Wide Web. Confidential information on individuals contained in centralized computer databases by credit bureaus, government agencies and private business firms has been stolen or misused, resulting in the invasion of privacy, fraud and other injustices. The unauthorized use of such information has seriously damaged the privacy of individuals. 

Being online, whether visiting a shop site for online shopping, chatting in chat room, updating a blog post, writing an e-mail, downloading a free phone/desktop application, or posting in a social networking site, is really a pleasurable activity and does make spend a good time in this world of internet. But, If we aren’t smart users, anytime we send an e-mail, access a website, post a message to a newsgroup, or use the internet for shopping; whether we are online for business, learning, or pleasure, we are vulnerable to anyone bent on to collect data about us without our knowledge. Fortunately, by using tools like encryption and anonymous remailers – and by being selective about the sites we visit and the information we provide – we can minimize, if not completely eliminate, the risk of our privacy being violated.

The internet is notorious for giving its users a feeling of anonymity, when in actuality; they are highly visible and open to violations of their privacy. Once this privacy is violated, it results in many severe attacks on our online presence. The issues like hacking, information retrieval, spam, viruses are worth giving a thought and making our online presence secure from such attacks is even a more responsible job of every netizen like us.

Although it is impossible to completely remove these threats to our online privacy but we can definitely minimize it by being smart online and using some smart techniques. Some of these are:

·        Don’t share your personal information, too often, on internet. Don’t ever submit such critical information to unknown sites. Stay away from online lotteries.

·        Use highly secure/strong passwords (which should be hard to guess) to every e-mail or other web accounts. Strong passwords are mainly a combination of Alpha – numeric keys with some symbols.

·        Don’t make everyone your friend on Facebook or other social networking sites. Anyone can prove to be harmful to your privacy.

·        Use advanced security settings to make your online presence highly secure. This can minimize the attack of hacking or spam’s.

·        Last but not the least; learn to maintain the difference between this virtual world and the real world. Anything could be a fake or fraud; anyone could prove an enemy on Facebook…… Don’t take anything serious. Live out Loud.

  Let’s pledge to be secure online. Wish you all a secure and safe online presence now onwards.