Tuesday, March 2, 2010

Mine is Better than Yours!

Genre: Entertainment

One thing all of us found out over a period of six months in USA was that American TV advertisements suck when it comes to originality and creativity compared to the Indian TV advertisements. All TV ads in US have one single underlying theme – openly humiliate and pull down your competitor to prove your superiority. See these samples-

(Click on links if videos do not load in your browser)

The most popular “ad war” is between cellular providers - AT&T and Verizon.

Here, Verizon pulls down AT&T on their 3G coverage-

Not to be left behind, AT&T gets back at Verizon-

In the car market, Chevrolet decides to pull down Toyota-

The “war” extends to pizza as Domino’s takes on Papa John’s-

And then of course, the classic – Pepsi vs Coke-

But wait, there is more! You need a cable TV to see these ads, right?

So, Dish Network goes up against DirecTV-

And now comes the bad news! Finally India has also caught up with this American trend of openly pulling down competitors in TV ads!

Here we go-

For once, I want all those so-called “protectors of Indian culture” to come out and protest this! Please don’t kill the creativity and originality from Indian TV ads! The Indian audience is not dumb enough to fall for these pranks! Jaago ad makers, jaago!

P.S. : There was one more brilliant (by American standards) ad of Hardee’s vs McDonald’s, but I don’t seem to find its video anywhere.

6 comments:

  1. dude...how could you miss out on the epic Sprite vs Mountain Dew saga?!

    That was like the first OPEN WAR in the FMCG sector...

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  2. @Freak

    Dude, that was more subtle - they used each others' taglines and spoofed each others' ads but never did Mountain Dew mention the word "Sprite" or vice-versa explicitly. Now it is reaching the American level of shamelessly ridiculing the competitor by its name!

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  3. nice collection of videos! :)

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  4. LOL good one, man :) btw the first one that came to my mind was the mountainDew vs Sprite ad :D

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  5. And now P&G has taken HUL to court over the ad!!! That's the difference between Indian and USA! BTW, newspapers here were going crazy over the dispute with headlines involving various permutations of the phrase "washing dirty linen in public" seen on every TV channel and several newspapers.

    I too recalled the Dew-Sprite ad wars a few years back but even prior to that, if you remember, were the original Pepsi-Coke Indian wars - at that time, Coke used "Puppy" or some such to refer to its competitor :P

    No doubting that Indian ads still top the list in originality - seen the latest Docomo ad about "friends sharing everything"? :D

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  6. @Sriram

    As I mentioned earlier, Mountain Dew vs Sprite was a bit subtle coz they did not show or name each other's products explicitly!

    @Manish

    I am glad they have gone to court over this. Shows that Indian companies have not yet stooped so low as to accept this kind of advertising as norm and start lambasting left right and center.

    Just saw DOCOMO ads - nice, inspired from Vodafone ZooZoo concept and Airtel ads.

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