LIP SYNC: Ad films are often shot in two versions. The Hindi version and the Tamil/Telugu version. All other languages are then dubbed on to the two originals. This is especially required when there are a lot of dialogues to be delivered. So the less dialogues to be delivered to camera, the better your language adaptations will be.
Yet another ad captured the imagination of the young in the mid-’90s by using a mix of English and Hindi words. This was the milk promotion ad done by FCB Ulka for NDDB. The jingle ran ‘Doodh, doodh, doodh, wonderful doodh, piyo glassful…’. This ad gets mentioned as one of the all-time favourites of young and old across India. But it is difficult to imagine in 2010s that this was one of the first ads to systematically use a mix of Hindi and English words. Interestingly, if we were to look at Bollywood dynamics, we see some interesting parallels. Hindi films in the early years, pre-post-independence, have a strong dose of Urdu to the extent that poet Sahir Ludhianvi once caused controversy by asking why Hindi films were not certified as Urdu films as all of them were in Urdu anyway, observed Professor Harish Trivedi, who has looked at how the Hindi language has evolved in Hindi cimema1. Historian and novelist Mukul Kesavan is also reported to have said that there exists a singular relationship between Hindi films and Muslim-ness, which is not only reflected in films with Muslim characters and themes, but has determined the very nature of this cinema. But Harish Trivedi points out that a random analysis of film titles indicates that Urdu titles account for less than 10 per cent, Hindi and Hindustani titles dominate with a couple of English titles. But this analysis was done for the period upto 1998. Till then you had Hindi films using different types of Hindi: Dialect Hindi (eg. Do Bigha Zamin, Ganga Jumna); Sanskritic Hindi (eg. Aakrosh, Maya Darpan); Bambaiya Hindi (eg. Rangeela, Amar Akbar Anthony). But the 2000s have seen Hindi movies embracing Hinglish with full vigour. As Harish Trivedi has commented, even on home ground, Hindi cinema is now acquiring a new, elite variety of Hindi in Hinglish, which could perhaps be seen in terms of cultural classification and moving it far from the social spectrum of a rural dialect.
The phenomenon of Hinglish is now all-pervasive, from ads to movies to television serials. Even an illiterate villager today knows a smattering of English words he has heard in movie songs and ads. Words like ‘OK’, ‘love’, ‘perfect’, ‘tip-top’ and more are part of rural dialects today. The brand Fair and Lovely is referred to as ‘Lovely’ in the villages of UP. The spread of Hinglish and the awareness that English can open up new doors of employment and success is spurring the growth of English-medium schools across India. Unfortunately, even the teachers in many of these schools do not know how to read or write English beyond the basic few sentences.
A few years ago, a publisher in Chennai approached me to see if one of my brand management books could be translated into Tamil. I was curious to know why they thought there was a potential for a Tamil book on branding. The smart publisher explained that there were over 500 business schools in Tamil Nadu and the students enrolled in over 300 of them could not read English fluently. This publisher had spotted an opportunity to provide them with Tamil translations of management books, which they could read in Tamil, understand the principles and maybe then answer their test papers in their own version of broken English.
It is to be noted that India is probably the only country in the world where readership of newspapers is continuing to rise, as confirmed by the Indian Readership Survey 2014. This has been driven by the growth of Indian language newspapers and the growing literacy in rural India. English language newspapers are in slow decline, though the desire to learn English is palpable across the country. Some Indian language newspapers have experimented with offering one page in English. Rajasthan Patrika experimented with this approach and tasted success. There are many more such experiments that should be tried out to bridge the Hindi-Hinglish-English divide.
We should thank the Tamils for keeping the English flag flying in India. Author Bala Jeyaraman writes that it was EV Ramaswamy who launched the first ever Anti-Hindi Agitation in 1937 across the then Madras constituency2. In a repeat of this, in 1968, the DMK party led the Anti-Hindi agitation against the Bhakthavatsalam-led Congress government in Madras state. That widespread agitation in a sense led to the electoral victory of DMK and the continued domination of DMK/AIADMK in Tamil Nadu, now running for over forty years. Interestingly, while Hindi agitation has kept English alive and kicking, you may have to know Hindi to order idly at the Saravana Bhavan restaurant in KK Nagar, Chennai.
Here is an interesting anecdote. My good friend Srini was at the said restaurant ready to have a hearty breakfast after an exhilarating motorbike ride. So he asked the waiter who was at his table, ‘Sooda enna irruku?’ (What is available, fresh and hot) in Tamil and the waiter is reported to have asked him ‘Kya bola?’ (What did you say?). So while Hindi has been kept out of the compulsory part of education in Chennai, the citizens of that city are today served by immigrant labourers from the Northern states of India. So if not to get government jobs, Tamils may just have to learn Hindi to get their dosas at the nearby Saravana Bhavan.
As advertising gets created in Indian languages and as television penetration goes deeper and deeper into the country, we are seeing yet another phenomenon developing. Cogito Consulting of FCB Ulka decided to analyse advertising of popular consumer products picked from the ’80s, ’90s, 2000s and 2010s. A total of 120 ads for consumer products like soaps, shampoos, detergents etc. were analysed. The researchers decided to count the number of words used in each ad.The words could be dialogue spoken by a character, jingle or a voiceover announcement. What they found was indeed interesting. There has been a steady increase in the number of words employed in advertising over the forty-year period. From an average of forty-one words in an average thirty-second advertisement, the number has steadily climbed to fifty-three in 2010s. What has led to the increase in the word count? According to global ad guru Professor John Philip Jones, an effective ad is generally more visual than verbal, the number of words in a thirty-second commercial should be restricted to thirty or less; the picture should tell the story3. If this is true, why are marketers thrusting more and more words into advertising for mundane products like toothpastes and beverages? What could have happened in the last forty years?
VOICEOVER: Advertising voiceover artistes are an interesting breed. Often they can provide the voice of a film star or sports star even better than the star himself.
Compared to the 1980s, television has become an even more of a mass market media in the 2010s. In the ’80s, just about 15 per cent of homes across India had access to television. The number is set to cross 70 per cent in 2015. As a result of this, ads beamed through television are reaching a much larger percentage of the consuming public – in fact, the pet peeve of the Indian Broadcasting Foundation is that by using television rating points as the measurement metric, the advertising community is not considering the fact that 5 per cent viewership in 30 million homes is not the same as 3 per cent viewership in 100 million homes. The growth of television penetration has given mass market consumer brands a big thrust in terms of attracting new users to their brands. Many of these new users need to be told the full story, since they are probably semi-literate. As a result of this, brands are today including elaborate product and ingredient descriptions. Compare a 2010 ad for soap to the Liril ad from the 1970s. You will be surprised to see how the ad for the simple product has an elaborate description of the ingredients, how they act on the skin and keep you glowing etc. The same could be said of a shampoo or a detergent powder. The second phenomenon is the growth of advertising pre-testing across all FMCG marketers. The ads are first created in an animation format and are tested with the target audience. Agencies and brand managers often work together to ensure the ads pass this test. Adding more words helps the process, so does the addition of a celebrity, a baby or a dog. The third reason is the proliferation of brands and brand extensions. From the simple offer of Lux available in pink, w
hite and green, now you have numerous sub-brands and variants with exotic ingredients like strawberry, peach, olive, chocolate, even sea minerals. All this means that the ad needs to have what is known as a ‘product window’ or ‘freight section’ to explain the logic of what sea minerals have to do with a simple soap.
Professor Gerald Zaltman of Harvard Business School lists six marketing fallacies and one of them happens to be that marketers tend to think that ‘consumers think in words’. He explains: Marketers also believe that consumers’ thoughts occur only as words. Thus, they assume they can understand consumers’ thinking by interpreting the words used in standard conversations or written on a questionnaire4. This excessive focus on words and ignoring the non-verbal cues from consumers leads to an overload of verbal content in advertising as well, ignoring the importance of other cues that may be more effective. In India too, marketers are adding words to their advertising, hoping to communicate better with their target consumers.
Linguistic experiments are being tried out even in television. Educationalists are today advocating same language subtitling as a way to speed up literacy. Hindi songs with subtitles have enabled semi-literate viewers to develop the courage to start reading. Zee Studio and Zee Café, two English-language channels from the Zee Group experimented with same language subtitling of English programming. This move, which may sound rather daft, ended up creating a new trend. Today almost all English-language channels are resorting to same-language subtitling. The English subtitling and Hindi subtitling serve different objectives. English subtitling is needed by most Indian viewers due to their inability to decode the diction of Hollywood films and serials. In the case of Hindi subtitling, the objective is more educational. Sociologists have shown that literacy levels can be driven up if Hindi programming is subtitled in Hindi!
What has led to all these experiments and why are consumers being subjected to these?
India is often described as a continent connected through shared values. Our languages separate us but our culture keeps us connected. The country, over the last fifty years, has seen some dramatic migratory trends. As generations move out, they are also trying to keep in touch through popular media. As the world-reknowned columnist and author Thomas Friedman points out, while we all desire the Lexus in our garage, we are also looking for that specific brand of olive oil from our hometown to add that special flavour to our cooking5. This desire to drift apart and at the same time keep links to the mothership has led to numerous media and linguistic experiments. As the cost of creating content in different languages keep declining, we will see the emergence of numerous types of media content. For instance, we have seen the birth and growth of Oriya and Bhojpuri television channels in the 2000s, just as we saw the growth of Tamil and Telugu private channels in the early ’90s. Digital media will help boost this further as we see various dialects having their own channels of delivery. So as this changes media consumption, there will also be a growing demand for content that unites us as one country. So the future of Hindi, English and Hinglish is also relatively safe.
As we drift apart, we will also develop an ability to appreciate something that is alien to our cultural sensibilities. Take, for example, the top-grossing film of 2014, Chennai Express. The film starring Shah Rukh Khan and Deepika Padukone used Tamil dialogues for the Tamil characters without any subtitling. The director of the film, Rohit Shetty, decided that film is a visual medium and can be understood even without the spoken words. And that is what happened. One of the songs from the film is today a must-dance-to number in every North Indian wedding. The ‘Lungi Dance’ song must have sold several million dollars worth of lungis, and sunglasses, across wherever the Indian diaspora lives.
That we are finally one country was brought out wonderfully in an ad done for Nestle by McCann in 2014. A young couple are adopting a little girl who is from a different ethnic group at an adoption centre. Their son does not take well to his new sister who also looks so different from him. He fights with his mother to keep her attention. But one day the two kids are in the garden digging. The little girl, quite bravely, pulls out an earthworm with her hands. The young boy is quite amazed at her courage but does not show it as she puts the worm in a glass jar. We then see her leading him to raid the kitchen, climbing up to the top shelf to pull out a jar of cup cakes. He is now her fan. The film ends with the two of them cozily sharing cake. The film poignantly presents the potential of adoption to change this country. And I do hope the film got a few more couples to adopt children who are not from their own neighbourhood.
So from pristine pure English to Hindi to Hinglish, the language of Indian advertising is now a cacophony of many languages. On an average show, you may see ads done in English, Hindi, Hinglish and maybe even in yet another Indian language. With this ever-expanding palette of languages, our country continues to enthrall all of us, while becoming a bigger and bigger puzzle for foreigners to unravel.
No Squeeze, No Wheeze, No Navel Please!
IN THE EARLY ’80s, Boots Company was rated as one of the top ten pharmaceutical companies in India. In addition to making several fast-selling pharmaceutical brands such as Digene, Brufen, Cremmafin, Entamizole, the company also had a very successful OTC range consisting of Strepsils throat lozenges and Coldarin cold tablets. It was around 1984, as a Group Product Manager at Boots, when I was tasked to see if the company could revive any of the other brands in its archives. The attention soon focused on Sweetex, an artificial sweetener brand the company had launched in the ’70s but had withdrawn due to negative press about its key ingredient, saccharine. But this was the ’80s, saccharine no longer had such a bad halo and calorie control was in the news. The company was keen that Sweetex becomes its fourth brand – in addition to Strepsils, Coldarin and Burnol – in the fledgling OTC division. An inter-departmental committee was formed to ensure that the packaging was in attractive plastic, leakage of the liquid pack was near-zero and supplies were certain. It then took up the job of creating demand. Boots decided to hire the ad agency that was making waves in the mid-1980s, Trikaya, to handle this launch. Television was expected to be the key medium, and so the agency was briefed to create a television advertisement which would position Sweetex as the perfect complement to a healthy, low-calorie diet. The film made by Prahlad Kakkar showed a svelte young girl getting into skin-tight jeans and cavorting as the jingle went: ‘No squeeze, no wheeze, no sugar in my coffee, please. Sweetex, Sweetex, a sweeter life without calories’.
Those were the days of Doordarshan. Before an ad is made at great cost, the agency always gets a ‘storyboard’, which is a pictorial depiction of the ad, approved by the Doordarshan authorities.
The agency had done its job, the film was made and all of us loved the film and its energy. The next step was to get the final film approved by Doordarshan. The agency did not see any problem since the storyboard was already approved.
Then came the bombshell. Doordarshan rejected the film on the grounds of obscenity. We were shocked and angered. The film did not violate any norms laid down by the authorities, unless there were any that we did not know of. So I was told by the company to go to Delhi, to the Doordarshan Head Office at Mandi House, plead the case and not come back without a ‘yes’!
The agency team accompanied me to Doordarshan and we met the person who had rejected the ad. When we started discussing the film, we were told that the film showed the ‘navel’ of the model in a close-up shot right at the beginning of the film. And that was seen as obscene. The film-maker had shown the model dressed in a halter top and jeans, so her midriff was exposed and when the words ‘No squeeze’ was said in the audio track, the model measures her midriff with a tape. I tried explaining how it was a dress style and we had not tried to show a navel for the sake of cheap titillation.
I then had the temerity to tell the Doordarshan official how I did not consider the display of a navel as ‘obscene’; I even mentioned that the previous day on the popular film-song programme Chayageet on Do
ordarshan I counted not less than five different navels of film stars on show, with one such midriff serving the purpose of a table in the hands of a handsome hero. I even tried the argument of how our temples and places of worship show gods and goddesses with their midriffs exposed.
Soon I was told to stop and was given a lecture on how all such exposure will be abolished and Doordarshan will not show anything that is even remotely obscene. We were told to change the visual and reapply for permission. Case dismissed!
I came back to Mumbai pretty upset since the film would have to be reshot at considerable expense, but fortunately the film-maker figured out a way of doing a low-cost shoot of only one visual. The film went on air a fortnight later. Unfortunately, the brand did not perform to the expectations of the company, it was a little too ahead of its time, and television advertising stopped after the first year. So I was spared any more encounters with the DD authorities and their obsession against bare navels.
If we were to dial back to the days before commercial advertising on government-owned television, the primary mode of audio-visual advertising was through cinema halls. Brands made shorts of roughly 100 feet length (30.4 metres). These films which ran for one minute, had to be shown to the censor authorities and a censor certificate had to be obtained. Till date, this practice continues, as you would have noticed if you have been in any movie hall. I believe censor authorities were probably a lot clearer about what they wanted to stop and their process was a lot less arbitrary than the ‘navel-hating’ Doordarshan of that time. The censor authorities had approved a bikini-clad girl cavorting under a waterfall for Liril soap in the mid-’70s and, if we were to believe Alyque Padamsee, the model had ingested good quantities of rum to face the cold waters in winter.
Nawabs, Nudes, Noodles Page 23