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Selling: the French way
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Messages of all kinds — funny, boring, shocking — zapped viewers
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— Photo: AFP
Ads have the power to deliver the message: funny, frivolous or, forceful.
ONLY THE French are capable of such things. Imagine having something called The Night of the Ad-Eaters (!) where you just put up your feet and guffaw at over 111 minutes of French advertising! Burp!!
Watching the boob tube at home, it's almost taken for granted that commercial breaks are the time to rush to the loo or catch up on the cellphone, grab dinner, talk to spouse... and other such mundane things in life. But watching a never-ending string of commercials that demand so much attention from your eyes and ear at a stretch is, well, brain draining.
Alliance Francaise de Bangalore organised The Night of the Ad-Eaters, a compilation of some of the best short ad films from different of the Francophonic world (French-speaking countries). Since 1981, Paris's La Nuit des Publivores (The Night of the Ad-Eaters) has been a popular annual event that showcases innovative and award-winning advertising films, presented by the Cinémathèque Jean Marie Boursicot, the first archive in the world devoted to the preservation of advertising films. Since 1983, the festival has been touring the world.
Mad ads
Predominantly peppered with humour, most of the ads come with English sub-titles, plugging everything ranging from cars and beer to condoms and McDonald's. What stands out is the stark contrasts in the advertising world from the '70s to the 2000s where they have grown from selling products through people dancing and cavorting in gaudy studios to technology-driven zany animation and, importantly, advertising based on creative ideas.
It's quite difficult to recall many of the ads after the bombarding of images and the tiring rapid reading of the sub-titles, but some that impact do linger. Like all good advertising is meant to be.
It's that great brilliance sometimes that comes from a simple idea — a happy whistling milk delivery boy cycles through a sleepy town throwing milk bottles at footsteps and shattering them. An ad for a job website, it says all about the square peg in a round hole — a total case of a job mismatch for a former newspaper delivery boy! My saying this doesn't sound interesting. It has to be seen!
The British sense of humour, sometimes black, stands out in the ads for the Belgian beer Stella Artois with the catchphrase "reassuringly expensive". One must admire the way humour surfaces through times of the black plague and the deathbed to sell beer to the Brits!
Striking it right
The ads spanned decades of French advertising as well as countries like Canada, Belgium, Ivory Coast, Great Britain, Switzerland, Mali, Tunisia and even a country as distant as Burkina Faso! Ads from many of the countries in the African belt may well have reminded us of old (and current) Indian ads where women are bathing and scrubbing themselves with soaps, serving their husbands yummy food, and colourful drinks to their guests, or dancing around with aluminium cooking vessels saying `This is what my daughter will take to her husband's home'.
The one that perhaps appealed to the young audience at the Alliance most was an awareness campaign (`public service message' as we would call it in India) to "keep the sea clean". A guy jogging along the beach hurls some junk into the sea. He's immediately counter-attacked by the sea that throws up all sorts of stuff humans choose to dump into it, as he runs for life. `Imagine if the sea were to defend itself' says the strapline. One must admit visuals sometimes say so much more than words and draw appreciation.
And it is the power of this medium that tends to strike you. How it can be something meaningful, how it can shock, and impact. One of the most striking ads people will carry back in their minds perhaps is one of the most depressing ones. Surprisingly. The first shows an elaborate scene of a young girl being raped in an empty basement below her apartment building. As she goes through a gut-wrenching struggle with the rapist, she slashes his wrist. After a whole string of funny ads, the audience tends to sit up shocked, waiting and wondering if this is an ad at all, and if so, for what. The final and shocking scene has the girl being brought home by the father who tells her everything's going to be all right, and puts an arm with a bandaged wrist around her, while the strapline warns youngsters and elders alike of how nearly 70 per cent of cases of sexual abuse involve family members.
BHUMIKA K.
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