‘Woke’ advertising focuses on societal issues in order to attract today’s more aware consumer
‘Woke’ advertising focuses on societal issues in order to attract today’s more aware consumer
‘Woke’ advertising focuses on societal issues in order to attract today’s more aware consumer
‘Woke’ advertising focuses on societal issues in order to attract today’s more aware consumer
‘Woke’ advertising focuses on societal issues in order to attract today’s more aware consumer
‘Woke’ advertising focuses on societal issues in order to attract today’s more aware consumer
‘Woke’ advertising focuses on societal issues in order to attract today’s more aware consumer
Nobody likes advertising. It is really the ultimate Great Gatbsy, shiny, shallow and over-the-top, throwing huge, glittering parties for people it does not even know, desperate to be loved and accepted, and meeting with only fleeting, erratic success.
But unlike Jay Gatsby, who was at least driven by love, advertising is driven by lust for lucre. It sponsors beauty pageants, award shows, the best TV and digital content and the IPL, essentially in a bid to kiss up to you and become your bestie, all the while whispering words into your ear that confirm your worst insecurities (not fair enough, not strong enough, not rich enough, not smart enough, not popular enough). And it always, always, has one eye on your wallet.
Consumers—who today are the wokest they have ever been—sense this, and have only contempt for it. They enjoy what it has to offer, but despise it for its pushiness and its desperation to be liked. Aided by smart technology, they fast-forward, skip and dodge it adroitly, never letting it into their inner circle, or inviting it back to the exclusive private parties they hold in their own homes. And so advertising has had to become insidious. In the old days, it used to straight out declare itself; it used to say “I am advertising—slick, glossy, over-bright, shallow, shiny and simple.” But now, it has become a creature that hides its teeth.
Firstly, it has gone native. It sidles up to celebrities, offering to sponsor their holidays to exotic destinations if they will, in return, very casually feature its products on their social media. Hotels, cars, swimming costumes, cosmetics, phones, watches, shoes, restaurants, wedding lehengas and sherwanis are all popping up very ‘casually’ and ‘organically’ on celebrity Instagram stories and pictures, all in exchange for a fat fee. A recent sting operation conducted by Cobrapost proved that even political opinions can be bought. Thirty-six Bollywood celebrities, including Kailash Kher, Mika Singh, Sunny Leone, Jackie Shroff, Shakti Kapoor, Sonu Sood, Ameesha Patel and Rakhi Sawant, were willing to post messages favourable to a particular political party in exchange for money in the run-up to the 2019 general elections.
Another way of going native is to infiltrate content itself. A lot of film, TV and digital content now includes in-product placement. In one of the first instances, it was done horribly by Coca Cola in 2001 in a ghastly film called Yaadein. Now, it been refined to a fine art in the excellent and authentic new series Kota Factory on TVF, for an app called Unacademy that offers online coaching for the IIT joint entrance examinations. Unacademy’s advertising placement in Kota Factory is one other advertisers could emulate. Unlike Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the movie, which was so brazenly a two-hour advertisement for the BJP’s top man that even the lackadaisical Election Commission had to sit up, take notice and ban it from releasing before the elections.
Secondly, advertising has started pretending to care about the important issues of the day—impossible standards of beauty/toxic masculinity, LGBTQ rights, voting and democracy, discrimination against minorities/widows/people with physical challenges/ the girl child/children of sex workers, you name it, they are into it. So big is this trend of ‘woke’ advertising, that there are now awards for it, like the Glass Lions and the Social and Influencer Lions at the Cannes Advertising Festival. All this in an effort to be top-of-mind so that when consumers go out to make a purchase the brand’s name springs to their lips. Recent examples internationally include Nike’s work with American football quarterback Colin Kaepernick, and Gilette’s new take on its old line ‘The best a man can get’ which targets toxic masculinity. Both of these met with mixed reviews, but made the brands the ‘most-talked-about’ for weeks. Recent Indian examples include Surf Excel’s ‘Daag acche hain’ Holi ad with a Muslim boy and a Hindu girl, Dove’s Real Beauty campaign and Bennetton’s #UnitedByVote campaign for the 2019 general election.
The third big trend (or concern) is that nobody knows what to do about celebrity fatigue. A long, long time ago, movie stars used to grant us an audience rarely, appearing on flickering 70mm screens, with amplified sound and larger-than-life swag. We, the audience, crouching in the darkness below on expensively bought seats, dressed in our weekend best, would (literally) look up to them, reverentially putting aside all other distractions.
Today, things are different. We carry movie stars in our pockets now, inside our tiny phone screens, we bid them come out and do their stuff whenever we are bored, and they have to oblige. We can zoom in to detect their every flaw, we can replay endlessly to catch their minutest fumbles. And of course, we no longer look up to them, rather, we literally look down up on them as we watch them perform in the palms of our hands. (In fact, enabled by the internet, fans literally own their stars today. The trend started with fandom armies like for boy-bands One Direction and BTS and locally, Salman Khan’s bhai army. These people have a huge sense of entitlement, and fear of not disappointing them can lock stars into doing the same formulaic work, dumbing down content to the lowest denominator.)
Today’s is a jaded audience, scarred by seeing Pierce Brosnan sell pan masala and Will Smith dance awkwardly to a flop Bollywood song. Brand/celebrity credibility has taken a massive dip, what with Kingfisher collapsing, Jet Airways folding, Hrithik Roshan being recast as a villainous ‘stupid ex’, and Akshay Kumar being revealed to be a Canadian journalist with questionable taste in both interviewees and summer pants.
Mystique is at an all-time law, and celebrity ubiquity is at an all-time high. Stars are constantly in our face, posting Insta stories, pushing their movies, and interviewing each other on digital platforms. They are also designing apartments, setting up interior decor studios and writing books (a trend that I, a career writer, note with dismay). It is like everybody knows that legit, Grade-A celebrityhood is a short (and ever shortening) phase, one that must be milked to the max, as fast as possible.
This has resulted in celebrity endorsements becoming short on both life and credibility. In more innocent times, when Sachin Tendulkar and Shah Rukh Khan sold Pepsi we loved them and bonded with them. Today when Ranbir Kapoor is dropped by Pepsi and replaced by Tiger Shroff, and goes on to endorse Coke instead, the switch does not register as even a blip on consumer’s radars. It is like consumers know that stars are both fickle and interchangeable now. Tu nahi toh aur sahi, woh nahi toh aur sahi (if not you then someone else, if not him then someone else).
This maxim holds true for advertising itself. With increasingly unpredictable viewing patterns, a savvy audience, an atmosphere of incredulity created by the daily avalanche of fake news, online consumer reviews coming out for every new product practically as soon as it hits the market, and more and more marketers bypassing the large agencies with their percentage-of-media-spend based commissions, in favour of small, nimble boutique shoppes, advertising in its traditional form is becoming increasingly redundant today.
The Great Gatsby could very well be dead. And just like in the book, nobody may come to the funeral.