Sometime this week I read that Hindustan Lever Limited was relaunching Close Up and had planned an entire advertising blitz to make it a more “happening” toothpaste. Today when I dropped into Rediff a bizzare site awaited me:)
A nice red home page. right at the bottom was the legend – if you looked hard enough – turn off the red. I would suppose that with one’s eyes assaulted by such red – most viewers would hit the back button.
This is in the same league as the ToI selling its mast head to the now defunkt Indya.com. My parents cancelled their subscription to the ToI for a full two years after that. We switched to the Asian Age – which had a habit of leaving newsprint on your hands. Finally we switched back to ToI last year. The only reason we went back was because my brother was in college, and missed all the advertisements for higher education. Imagine buying a newspaper, daily, because you don’t want to miss the ads:)
Coming back to the home page on rediff – My first reaction was “what the f***..”,There was only red – nothing that could be read – and i am truly sorry abou the bad pun. While I blog I realise that maybe it is an “innovative” marketing technique that is supposed to get people in. But how are you going to get people to sample your products, when you piss them off completely. While i understand that i am not the only audience, I would represent a certain type of demographic that the client wishes to attract.
Somehow common sense has been replaced by a slew of in your face marketing, that possibly pisses off the person that one is trying to market to. And this has really been on the rise over the last 8 to 10 month. There was India Shining, Vajpayee Greeting, a whole range of SMS based advertising that has been driving me mad, and of course God knows how many phone calls.
Today it was HDFC bank offereing me their credit card. The bimbette at the other end told me that i could buy things on credit with it. Interesting. I am not sure that I will touch any of HDFC’s credit cards with a barge pole.