AB’s got to worry

Now the debate on the use of film stars as brand ambassadors can start afresh.
Amitabh Bachchan, arguably the most preferred brand ambassador that this country has produced, talks up Mulayam Singh’s cause during the election campaign to the Uttar Pradesh assembly elections.
And Mulayam Singh comes a cropper.
Consumers do see through communication and storyboards – and they have rejected AB’s plugs for the Samajwadi Party.
Arguably, the most significant failure of AB the brand ambassador. Worth chewing on.

Big B as Frankenstein's monster

I know Sanjay Jha as a lover of cricket. He and his wife started cricketnext.com, lost money running it for ages, but neither of them cared a whit about the cash drain. Cricket is Jha’s passion, and thankfully, the bleeding didn’t hurt him too much.
Cricketnext.com was sold to ibnlive.com, and Jha now has a canvas beyond cricket, with his very own non-cricket blog on the site, jhakas.
And the first of his non-cricket posts that I’ve read made me sit up and think.
Titled Kaun Banega Conpati, Jha writes with (near) anguish on Amitabh Bachchan’s doublespeak and duplicity vis-à-vis politics. The same man who left “the cesspool of politics” plays brand ambassador for Mulayam Singh and Amar Singh, and this disgusts Jha.
But this side of Bachchan is unpalatable to any number of Indians, including me. So what’s new?
What startled me when I read the blog was Jha’s observation on who created the phenomenon that is Amitabh Bachchan:

“It was to do with a nasty punch in his belly during the shooting of Coolie, a typical Manmohan Desai madcap trash.
Thanks to the only TV channel the country had, the government owned Doordarshan broadcasting regular bulletins on Bachchan’s regular pulse beat, Breach Candy overnight became a tourist destination.
An anxious nation fervently prayed for Bachchan’s recovery, making the lanky tall man from Allahabad our first real Bollywood hero into a national obsession.
Mrs Indira Gandhi, then India’s prime minister left her official engagements to visit the ailing actor, as she valued his eminently revered parents and their close family bondage.
In my opinion, that was the day the real super-hero was born in India. A mass entertainer battling a grievous threat to his life, was given a special legitimacy by India’s first family.
Bachchan became a bigger household name, and captured the national imagination like no other.”

Indira Gandhi is the Frankenstein and Bachchan the monster?

Jha’s is the first piece that I’ve read editorially challenging the Big B. In a country like India, we are reluctant to criticize phenomena and idols. Jha does so, with fact and conviction. That, in itself, is refreshing.
Click here to read Jha’s entire take. It’s worth the journey.

Image courtesy: http://www.saumag.edu/

MRF: 3 men and a century

It’s a landmark that I missed. Astonishingly, it’s a landmark that MRF missed and their ad agency, Lowe, missed as well.
The tyre company signs on three cricketers as brand ambassadors. The first, Steve Waugh, has since retired, having scored 32 centuries. The second, Sachin Tendulkar, is the holder of the record for the highest number of Test centuries with 35 of them. And the third, Brian Lara, scored his 34th ton yesterday, and is now nipping at Sachin’s heels.
Now add 'em up!
32+35+34 = 101.
Óne hundred and one centuries between the three MRF brand ambassadors!

And no one noticed it.

No name credit card launched

This, I’ll never understand. Why the photo if the news is not newsworthy? And how is it newsworthy if you don’t mention the company at whose launch Sania Mirza and Sunil Gavaskar were present? Which, by the way, was Deutsche Bank.
Or is it just an excuse to include a “current” photo of a celeb?
If that’s the case, can we be more imaginative and have better photos? Please?
It’s happened a zillion times before, and I blogged about, once, here.

Why not Sunny? Why not Azhar?

Three discrete pieces of news, and they make for interesting reading. Hema Malini signs a contract as brand ambassador for Hakoba. Sachin signs a contract with Canon, for a fee that remains “undisclosed”. Saurav Ganguly scores a century.
In Hema Malini’s case, her contract is part of a double contract; her daughter Isha (correction: Esha is how it's spelt, I'm informed) is part of the deal. That’s one way to stretch your celeb career – tie it up with a younger, more successful celeb.
In Sachin’s case, Iconix and World Sports Group are looking at new geographies to extend Sachin’s status as a brand ambassador, even as Indian brands are rethinking using him (Airtel, one of Sachin’s “original” contractees, did not renew his contract).
In Saurav’s case, he neither has a younger “partner” to tag on to, nor can he look at tapping the international market” and he’s trying to extend his celeb career by the oldest solution in the book: performance.
So what’s the point of this post?
The inability of Indian celebs to plan a life and career out of post celebrity-dom. Of all the stars that India produces, be it in Bollywood or in cricket, very few have managed to plan for their lives beyond the life of their professional careers. For example, even a Sunil Gavaskar or Mohd. Azharuddin is rarely seen as a brand ambassador. Other than Amitabh Bachchan (who is a “live” Bollywood star), where are the stars of yesterday seen in TV commercials?
Where does the problem lie? With the stars themselves that they have allowed their brand equity to die?
Or with the advertising industry, that they are not able to find ways to cash in on the brand equity of the stars of yesteryear?
It’s worth thinking about. Stars of the past will cost a brand much less than will current stars. And a number of them will evoke memories, will connect, and will deliver for the brand.