Your Ad Goes Here

I have a question for everybody: Which one hair of Iman Ali is telling her story? I really want to know. This question came to my mind after seeing the new Sunsilk campaign, which says that life can't wait and blatantly displays a quote by Iman Ali: 'My Hair Tells My Story.' If all her hair were telling her story then she would have said: 'My Hair Tell My Story.' But, since it’s 'tells,' I would really like to know exactly which one of her hair is telling it. Another thing that this ad has done is that it has strengthened by long-held belief that all the advertising agencies of Pakistan are full of people like my friend, the Alid. (For more information on who he is, please read my previous blog entry at http://habitsandpasttimes.blogspot.com/2008/01/life-and-non-murder-of-my-friend.html). And not just advertising agencies, but also these large and supposedly hip multinational FMCG corporations like Unilever. I know that the ad agency made the mistake but Unilever ultimately approved it so they are the ones who are actually at fault. I can't believe that they have all these rigorous recruitment processes: testing, interviewing, re-interviewing, re-re-interviewing, holding group discussions, psychologically profiling the applicants, so on and on and on, and they still ultimately end up hiring a monkey who can't spell.

I have displayed my distaste for advertisements many times and this seems to surprise many people because I am a graduate with a degree in marketing, and people cannot seem to fathom the fact that I of all the people would despise advertising so much. The truth is that I do; ads really irritate it me on some sort of a very human level. I find them to be irritants, ads invasion into my privacy. When I sit down in front of the television to watch a movie, that is all I want to watch: the movie. Not TVCs interrupting me every fifteen minutes and I certainly don't want to watch my movie enclosed in a broad outline of scrolls and logos. Ads are perhaps the main reason why I have actually stopped watching any kind of television at all. I would rather watch a 'watchable without subtitles' DVD than movies on Star Movies or HBO. But you can't hide from ads. They are everywhere. On billboards, blaring out of radios, painted on the side of bridges, on walls, buildings, trucks, vans (especially those new vans whose sole purpose is to waste gas and display those damn well lit backlit signs), buses, cars, poles, sidewalks, traffic lights, and lamppost. If they had their way, those damn advertisers would slap an ad on damn near anything with enough space on it. I know. I have worked in a media planning/buying agency and one of the most popular activities there would be for us to sit together and brainstorm on new and 'creative' ways of displaying ads to the target audience.

When I had first gotten that job, I was very excited and I told my father that I am going to work in a media planning and buying house. He asked me what that was. And when I explained it all, he said, 'Oh, so you will be working in advertising.' That really infuriated me, for I did not want to work in advertising. I went at great lengths and actually fought with my father and explained to him how media buying and planning is NOT advertising. After a heated discussion and argument that went on for a full hour, my father says to me, 'So, it's basically advertising, right?' From that day on, I made it a point to tell everyone that my line of work was NOT advertising, but placement of the ads. I was adamant and stubborn, and I would argue and fight and never admit that it was the same as advertising. It took me only a few weeks of working there when I realized that it pretty damn much WAS advertising. I hated to think that even though I did not make the ads, I was the one responsible for making people see them. I was the intruder here, doing unto others that which I sure hell did not want them do unto me. I quit my job, I realized what was wrong, still stick to my self-developed maxim: Creativity Should Never be a Nuisance.

This also has a connection with my Irony is Sometimes Perfect clause that I have drawn up. I know a guy who used to work for an online writing company. His job would be to select articles from the web and paraphrase them in his own words so as to avoid plagiarism. He was a very creative guy, perhaps too creative. He got fired for plagiarizing when he paraphrased an article that was already paraphrased and inadvertently changed it back into exactly its original form.

An End That is Not Beginning

It's funny (and perhaps sad too) that my life has become nothing more than just routine weekdays during which I long for my routine weekends. Ever since I take that first step into my car on a Monday morning, I start thinking about how many days are left till Friday when this week ends and the weekend begins. All through the week I have a subconscious countdown counting down the hours left until I make that final departure from my office building to end the week and begin the weekend. I think weekends are great. First of all, they are perhaps the only ends that actually have their own beginnings. And then I get two days off to sleep as late as I can, hang out late with my friends, and watch movies into the late nights until I fall asleep. I look forward to doing all these things throughout the week and never actually end up doing them over the weekend because something or the other other than something is happening. But that's ok because I still get those two days off of work, to which (have I mentioned it before?) I look forward to throughout the whole week.

So, you can well imagine my state of mind now that I have been working for 11 days straight without a single day off. Yes, all my dreams of enjoying my weekend last week were mangled, pulverized, rent, riven, ruptured, shredded, shattered, and smashed when I found out that I would have to work on Saturday and Sunday. Today is my 11th day at work without a break and it has been the longest week of my life.

Anyhow, my woes aside, have you all seen the new Rs. 20 banknote? I was under the impression that a new note was needed because many people were giving out Rs. 5000 notes to buy Rs. 5 worth of mint. This was because the new Rs. 5000 note looked very much like the now-old-but-the-then-new Rs. 20 note. I happened to perchance (yes, perchance) upon the new Rs. 20 today, and mazharfakhar (yes, mazharfakhar), it looks even more like the Rs. 5000 note than it did before! It's actually the same note, only they have changed the colors and added some fluorescent green here and a little 'peekish' red here. It now looks like a Rs. 5000 note that just came out of a bag of cotton candy.