Digging for Meaning

askme's commercials here. There are 3 of those. Firstly, its an ad for an app that has a celebrity endorsement. Secondly, its also an ad for an app that apparently does many things. Thirdly, its a headon competitor to leading single purpose apps. But the real question that one is left asking askme is 'WHAT DOES IT ACTUALLY DO?' Error 1: Lack of proposition in a fucking launch commercial. :O which makes me wonder why askme is burning cash with these ads. Why would someone posture, instead of actually communicating? Perhaps its a desperate dash to get the name out before the owners go out to woo investors. But which investors would put their money on such shallow proposition?  Error 2: wrong insight. The apparent insight around which this campaign is strung together seems to be - "people are fed up with having to manage so many apps on the phone". What utter bullshit. who in India is 'worried' about having to manage their cell phones. We,...

Matrix Cellular is quite possibly inflating your bills when you use their cards while traveling abroad. I traveled to Germany last September. During this time I used Matrix's O2 card. I was keenly aware of my usage, penny pincher that I am. So I was very surprised to see an inflated bill when I returned home, my credit card being charged already. I requested a bill. I was puzzled with the fact that the sums added up to the amount being charged. However, I had kept a tab on my usage and had an estimate in mind of my bill. On closer inspection, it turned out, that the anomaly is not in summation or in call rates. Instead, MATRIX HAD SYSTEMATICALLY INFLATED THE DURATION OF CALLS . Here's a snapshot of my bill. The number in red boxes is the duration of call as per my phone records. Matrix has agreed to my claims and now reduced the bill to account for inflated charges. (I had shared with them snapshots of my cell phone with call record.)  (its another 3 month...

Its easy to criticize. It comes easy. But it is not so productive. All it does is fill you up with negative energy and criticizing someone else only spreads that negative energy. So I was trying not to do any of that on this blog for the longest time. But that self censorship meant drying up of my writing habit altogether (coupled with the fact that I have been busy with better things in life. :) ) So here's another positive perspective.. i can dig dirt objectively. This objective dirt digging can actually help me (and you) not repeat those mistakes, the mistake by others. (Its so much harder to see our own mistakes!) So I try to list out fundamental and grave mistakes of others. I have done that before with, ET's abysmal editorial that completely lacked integrity (and logic) . Sergey Brin's weak -ass reason to invent Google glasses . Issues with Indian advertising (badly written, but some useful stuff there). Hypocrisy of social media 'activists' Ford Fig...

Marketer's assault on our Language = MAOL What do you do to wash your behind in the washroom? Do you trust your hands to do the job with water, or do you use paper? One day in college, a Chinese professor talked about this pertinent question when talking about cultural differences. She talked about how people see tissue paper as an essential solution, while there is an ecologically better solution 'at hand!'. The students were surprised with her point of view. Most of the students hailing from Indian metros, saw the tissue as a better alternative, a logical next step to the 'primitive' practice of washing with hands. That was one of the easy ways to differentiate oneself from the lower classes. The upper class is the one that has access to western lifestyle, which in Indian imagination is a 'step up', a logical next step . But this was different. This was a Chinese lifestyle too. (which is fairly absent from Indian imagination and hence exotic). ...

Note: This is from a series of posts that I would be writing about Marketing's assault on our language. (AOL) ______ Sometimes, weird vowel-less sounds (?) stumble out of busyfolks' mouth. When they utter these sounds among themselves, there is an implicit expectation that the meaning is understood. Its amazing really, a fence made of sounds. Recently, I was confronted with this particular sound -"FMOT". It took me  a while to hear sideways and decipher the words hiding behind the capital letters. "First moment of Truth". Most marketing students, including me, would know this as legacy of the store shelf Gladiator - P&G .Its an elegant concept really from a marketer's perspective - it is that decisive time frame when a customer first sees a product in the store shelf and gets sufficiently curious about it to buy it or not. It's a crucial time for the product - 'it's showtime!'  But is it a "moment of truth"? err.. i w...