From our friend Mayur Misra in India comes an interesting photograph:
Photo: Mayur Misra
As Mayur explains:
I don’t know if you have seen this one but the ad in the attachment is from 2007 of the ad wars between Jet Airways, Kingfisher Airlines and Go Airways in India. The background of the story is this: Jet Airways had changed the colors of its planes and the uniform and its airplanes then. Kingfisher Airlines is its biggest competitor and put the other ad 1-2 days later above the Jet ad. Now here is the smartest one, Go Air put the ad above both the airlines ads. See the series of ads in that context, it’s very funny.
This is not the first time we’ve seen such call-and-response advertising from India. I am guessing this practice exists in the U.S., especially on the local-advertising front, but it is probably rarer.
In an upcoming podcast, we tell the story of an advertising campaign whose message was blunted when the celebrity who appears in the ads was forced to advertise for a rival company (as he is the member of a professional sports team that made a deal with the rival). Remember Michael Jordan and the famous Nike/Reebok Olympic conflict?
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Am I the only one who notices the obvious photoshop job of the top ad?
Not to mention, why are Indian ads written in English?
This reminds me of Obama’s sequence of “time for change”, “change takes time”, and now the reality of “no change this time”.
Of course, the problem with this sort of advertising is that the original often comes out looking the best. In this case, I get the feeling that Kingfisher is a little nuts (and maybe holding a grudge) especially with the hideous extra exclamation mark. And I get the feeling that Jet is trying to clean up a bad reputation that they probably earned for a reason. By contrast the Go ad seems relatively professional, if a little sterile.
Ironically Obstructing Billboards are an insult to vistas, a blight of cities and a turnoff to tourists, EVERYWHERE except in Indian Megacities. A bright billboard with smiley faces does a lot to cover up a ghetto, hovel or slum.
Too bad it just papers over the true problems. Maybe they should also use olfactory advertising to cover up the stench.
@Robbie, what language would you have them be in? India has hundreds you can choose from. That’s why English (one of the national languages) is often used as a lingua franca.
@Robbie Laney: don’t see the necessity for Photoshop here … just a simple picture of 3 billboards, one on top of the other. As for why ads in India are written in English, what other language would you expect? There are, at least, a dozen unique languages and hundreds of dialects. English just happens to be the common denominator.
Agree with Robbie, actually to me it seems as both ads #1 and #3 were superimposed on the picture, and only #2 was there for real.
These are phony photoshop images.
You can just as easily place a centerfold there.
Move on nothing to see here.