beware of hookers

sadhuji

Hooking, as a friend of mine once explained, is an abbreviated form of the word ‘hoodwinking’. The hooker, in the Yankee vocabulary, stands for a woman who solicits financial favors in exchange of her physical assets. In the Indian context hookers are those who tap electricity from the main lines without authorization. And hooking in the ad world means getting the consumer to pine for more and more – show him the carrot and he keeps running till he finally stumbles and falls.

Take any product and you are continuously bombarded with visuals that leave no stone unturned to convince you that it is the only in the market among a whole lot of similar products that can really solve your problems – whether they are of pimples or dandruff or bad breath or dry scalp. Then there are the body soaps, a predominantly female bastion, which is under siege by the males – the logic is ‘if she can, then I also can.’ As the season changes and summer sets in, the ads switch over to the prickly heat powders and cold drinks. Both products present visuals in keeping with the times. Once again, the consumer has a really difficult task on hand because, mere seeing is not always believing. There is invariably many a slip between the cup and the lip. Hence, choice is tough.

But the ads on cell phones walk away with all the honors – a trend set up by one of the leading service providers encompassed all the regions of the country – the visuals were real treats to tired eyes when the camera panned from the deserts of Rajasthan to the green fields of Kerala taking in the beauty of the Himalayas and important landmarks on the way. The logic of multi language tasking rules the day even now – the latest rage is about telephones that are landlines where you do not pay rentals if you do not use the set. On the face if it, this is certainly an attractive proposition. And, in order to influence the maximum possible would-be customers, the ads run in Gujarati, Bengali and North Indian dialects. It is not simple dubbing but the complete background is different for each version. Similar to the ad of a cold drink that was released during the Durga puja festivals a couple of years back – the scenario was totally Bengali culture at its best. Creative minds work overtime to hook the customer – real dangerous hookers, one can say.

__________________
mooning over a moon journey