Mobile Services- Truth or Dare??

[Pratik Gupta]

Folks move over Colas, Beauty Soaps, Chocolates...Mobile is the latest
fad (plagarised from the ad of a mobile service provider..that says V
is the new ME..ridiculous!!!)

Any channel that I TRY to watch these days are airing a slew of mobile commercials. I, was trying to
watch Indian Idol yesterday, bravely braving the idiotic histrionics of
a very moronic Anu Malek. It is supposed to be 1 hour programme, with
30 minutes dedicated to Ads, and of those 30 minutes, almost 15 mins
were dedicated to Mobile commercials!!

Do not get me wrong here, I am not commenting on the aesthetics or the 'fun' quotient of the ads
here..Theya re extremely aesthetic and damn right funny and
sexy!!!Sadly, that is all that ads these days vye for...It is more like
a Truth or Dare game...where the odds are very heavily stacked in
favour of Dare....

The Docomo Ads show a girl from a conservative South Indian Family showing off her tattoo to her pious
mother, who in her typical tamil twang says..'Varry Nice'...One other
ad that comes to mind is that of a young disinterested guy getting a
job after he has managed with considerable ease to give all the wrong
answers..The message in these ads...Hear what you want to hear..Well, I
will tell you what I want to hear and I am speaking on behalf of most
of the mobile users of this country...I want better connectivity...Do
you hear me..I can manage without a caller tune...But I want better
network.

To this you will react by saying that this what the ads are trying to convey...Yes that is exactly what my problem is..They are
only conveying that...not delivering it...I have lost count of the
number of stairs I descend and ascend upon a day whenever my phone
rings...I have to go outside into an'open' area just to be able to hear
properly what the other person is trying to say..We have ads showing a
grandson playing chess in a moving train with his grandfather who stays
in a distant village..All I can say in response is 'HOW THOUGHTFUL'.
The reality is that in a fairly populated city like Kolkata the network
drops significantly...

We, as consumers, have long been fascinated by the concept of MORE. We want more discounts, more season
sales, more channels, more Ads..I think the paradigm is now
shifting..That is because now we are already getting more..The focus, I
feel, somehow has shifted towards the basic functionalities of a
product...So, the fetish for fancy caller tunes is now somewhat getting
replaced by the need for better connectivity, which is the most basic
requirement fron a mobile service provider...

We as consumers, I believe, prefer to watch fantasy on television..In our everyday
existence, we prefer the mundaneness and the predictability...

We want the ads to be funny, sexy, aesthetic and everything that it is
now...but we also want the brand to deliver on the very mundane and no
frill requirement that it had set out to deliver..

According to me a brand always delivers on its basic/expected performance first and
then on add-ons and not the other way round..and most certainly not on
the quality of ads it makes....

Do not play Truth or Dare with us...We do not want the Dare..Give us the Truth, and nothing but the whole TRUTH!!!!