Ad world

As we all know, promotion is the key to success for any product. You see lots of hoardings on your way to office, you see a lot of advertisements on TV, you see a lot of catchy lines on the newspaper. The sole purpose of all these is to catch your attention. But on seeing a couple of recent ads on TV, I was awestruck. Interestingly, both are for rival cellular service providers, Airtel and Vodafone (formerly known as Hutch). If you recall the history of Hutch, they relied only on a pug and its master to conquer the market. They were innovative right from their day one.
Coming back to our present scenarios, let me first present Airtel’s ad. One small boy waits for his mother to give him his supper. Suddenly he hears some noise outside and runs out. We were shown that his house is fenced (from which we understand that he’s living in sort of border). Another boy, probably from the neighbouring country, asks our boy in some alien language (at least it was alien to me), to give him his football that came to our first boy’s backyard. The first boy hesitates and then kicks the ball to the second boy. Then the second boy asks the first boy to join him for football and they both sneak beneath their respective fences and start playing together in the no man’s land. Then a voice sounds from nowhere, “Deewaren mit jaayen”, which means something like we remove all boundaries. Then the theme music of Airtel comes and the ad’s finished.
Then the second one, Vodafone. One guy was shown waiting in the elevator and looking suspiciously(or with interest) at all the girls who board the elevator. Even the lift-boy is annoyed by his behavior. Then we were shown that its night and our guy is still waiting in the elevator alone. He looks dull and exhausted. Then another girl boards the elevator and smiles at our guy, after which he sneaks next to her with a smile. Then the camera focuses on the guy’s mobile which displays the text – “Daily Astrology tip: You’ll meet your soul-mate in elevator today”. Then the theme music of Vodafone comes in an orange background and we were shown the text “Daily astrological alerts. Call XXX(I don’t remember the number)”.
I hope now you understood why these ads caught my attention. The innovativeness of these ad-makers is truly a big round of applause.