Scavenger Hunt 3: TV Ads

Ladies and Gentlemen,

Announcing the Third Scavenger Hunt - TV Ads

Here's the deal: Pick your top 3 TV advertisements from your place of research. Hopefully they are available on Youtube and you can simply get the embed code (look just below the video) and post it into Blogspot. Commentary, of course, appreciated.

Good luck with this foray into the intersection of old and new media!

To start us off, here are my top 3 ads from India:

3) The Blackberry Boys


Coming in third is the Vodafone/BlackBerry ad for prepaid services on BlackBerry. Other than the annoyingly catchy song, I'm a little intrigued by the way that BlackBerry is choosing to change its branding from men (largely middle aged) in suits to hip young men and women. So is this a case of the democratization of a brand or simply a case of rebranding? Of course, both the men in suits and the the hip young men and women appear to be urban and upper class, so while I appreciate, in particular, the attempt to make a brand more gender-inclusive, I'm wondering what a truly inclusive BlackBerry Boys ad would look like.

2) Cadbury Silk


At number two is an ad for Cadbury's Dairy Milk Silk chocolate. In addition to liking the song, I love the perfect contentment the guy derives from eating the chocolate bar. On the gender analysis front--I like that it is a male figure that is seen indulging in chocolate, instead of the usual chocolate = women (There's a related version of the ad with women dancers). I particularly appreciate how he treats himself to the chocolate bar after what seems to be a good meeting--and hey, who hasn't done that... Ok, before I give myself away, on to number one...

1) KitKat

Some of you may already know my partiality for this ad, so the number one slot won't come as a surprise. But, beyond singing squirrels there is something charming about the earnestness of the squirrels in this rendition of old-school Bollywood melodrama (it is an old Bollywood number), particularly in contrast with the vaguely too-cool-for-school hip young guys, who keep turning up everywhere with their fancy technology.