The recent elections in Madhya Pradesh set off a
veritable ad war. In making extravagant claims of accomplishments of the
government during the last five years the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) took
recourse to exaggerations and bluffs. Photographs of green farms and silky
smooth highways were picked up from the internet and passed on as achievements
of the government. Keeping a keen eye, the men of the Opposition –
the Indian
National Congress –pounced at the opportunity screaming that the ads of the
saffron brigade were a “collage of lies”. The Congress in the opposition has
been quite bitchy even otherwise. This was election time and it lost no time to
go all out to embarrass the party in power and unleashed a frontal attack.
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| MP Chief Minister Shivraj |
That the efforts of the Congress did not yield any
result is not quite relevant. But, quite plainly, it too has been economical
with truth in making claims and promises to the people in case it happened to
wrest power from the BJP. Electioneering being virtually a war of words
everything would seem to be fair in it; lies, slander, defamation, denigration
and even vilification of the opponents are kind of par for the course. Whoever
is able to convince the voters even with lies and untruths carries the day.
At elections candidates are out to sell themselves and
they would seem to promote themselves any which way using whatever means that
delivers the desired result. When it comes to the crunch, promotion of an
individual or a product in the market is largely based on only a wee bit of
fact mixed with a hefty portion of fiction. In these days of plummeting ethics
and commercialisation of virtually everything (including votes) it is the
claims and counter claims of achievements, mostly wild, are targeted at the
audience. After all, the idea is to manipulate thinking and behaviour of the
objects of their efforts.
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| The Congress contestant Scindia |
That is what advertising is all about. It has been
defined as a form of marketing communication “aimed to encourage, persuade or
manipulate an audience (viewers, readers, listeners; sometimes a specific
group) to take or continue to take some action.” The action desired aims at
driving consumer behaviour towards choosing the advertised object – be that
a commodity or an individual. In today’s highly competitive society truth has
virtually fallen by the wayside, more so at the market place. Manufacturing ads
in text or in audios or visuals has become an industry and the copywriters are
bright young people with an acutely imaginative mind, specialising in
communicational skills that enable conveying an idea – true or false – with as
much of brevity as possible. After all they are out to not only to persuade
people, they, in fact, wish to influence them to make the desired move or
decision. They are “creative” people selling dreams - visually and textually.
One cannot avoid their creativeness or inventiveness.
These are visible all over – in newspapers, billboards, posters, et al. They
are, however, most pervasive and, one dares say, effective on the television
which is the prime audio-visual medium today. Almost everyone has a TV set,
whether in a shanty or in a palatial house. With its great reach through the
satellites viewers in far flung parts of the country and even abroad get
exposed to the “creativeness” of these creative people. Some of them are
indifferent to their imaginative messages and some others take them – even if
misleading – as gospel truths. The gullible fall victims of these creative ads
and succumb to their claims that are mostly exaggerated and often false.
Thus one finds ads suggesting regular use of an energy
drink of malted milk enables a school-going child to get celebrated as the
“student of the year”; use of a particular brand of sanitary napkins enables a
teenage girl to top the board examinations; application of creams, lotions and
face washes lighten and whiten the skin in a jiffy; use of shampoos laced,
inter alia, with dry fruits are claimed to be anti-dandruff and prevent
hair-fall making (women’s) hair silky and lustrous; brushing teeth with a brand
of toothpaste kills germs crawling like ants all over on the gums and in the
gaps between the teeth, lending to them a sparkling white sheen; use of a
particular brand of pressure cooker imparts an amazing taste and flavour to a
dessert of grated carrot, popularly known as gaajar ka halwa and so on. The
commercial breaks every ten or fifteen minutes in half-hour slots are the
occasions when one is carpet-bombed with ads, brief stories contrived by imaginative
copywriters, generally in an effort to con the viewers into taking to the
product.
Some of the advertisers, particularly of cosmetics,
unfortunately try to exploit the weaknesses of their audience. We the non-white
people of Africa and Asia are, by and large, colour-conscious, having a
distinct weakness for fairer complexion. While some Africans crave to lighten
their skin tones, the craze is no less, for example, in Indonesia. And, in
India the classified ads section of newspapers are full of matrimonial ads that
look for only fair-complexioned brides – regardless of caste, community or
economic status. A report earlier this year was extreme in nature and somewhat
unnerving too. At an IVF clinic in India a childless woman desired a Caucasian
donor so that the child blended with her husband’s fairer family.
This craze for fairness is being exploited by
manufacturers of beauty products for which India seems to have become a
significant market. Indian manufacturers like Lakme, Himalaya and some multinationals
like Nivea, Garnier, Ponds, Vaseline, etc are in the market, aggressively
pushing their varied products. In their chase for that El Dorado of unblemished
beauty, Indian women – young or old – and, yes, even men are spending huge sums
out of their not always generous pay-packets. Seeking flawless skin with an
even tone and that elusive fairness coupled with protection from ultraviolet
rays young and old are consuming newer and newer generation of beauty lotions
and potions. The way the fairness creams are being advertised, it seems, a few
generations later Indians will overcome their brown complexion. Of late, Dove
owned by Unilever has entered the market in a big way and is trying to outdo
all others’ equally competitive products with its smooth copies and attractive
videos.
Indian women seem to have fallen lock, stock and barrel
for the beauty products so much so that currently the cosmetic market in the
country is estimated to be worth US $I.5 billion and is likely to double up to
approximately $3 billion by 2014. Hopefully, the users are aware of the risks
involved in indiscriminate use of these products purveyed by now almost a
thousand-odd manufacturers and are not taken in by their glib copies in slick
ads. According to Dr. Frank Lipmann of the Voice of Sustainable Wellness of the
US, most cosmetics and personal care products contain five major toxic
ingredients and these are “hidden” carcinogens; endocrine or hormonally
disruptive; penetration enhancers; and allergens. Unlike in the case of
tobacco, cosmetic products contain no warning although these could be
life-threatening to “the user and the foetus following maternal use and
absorption through the skin into maternal and foetal blood”
None of these
risks is ever mentioned in any of the cosmetic ads. After all, most ads are
“collages of lies”. Even Samuel Johnson found in their soul only “promise,
larger promise” and HG Wells branded them as “legalised lies”.
Photo: from the Internet
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