Subliminal Advertising

We had written a term paper and made a presentation on the subject in term 4. The group consisted of the esteemed Ms Thakur (as in - Shweta Thakur, lady who directed the public production in second year, who painted Dudu's, woman of spirit, woman of substance, who sometimes combined the two, etc) and yours truly (as in - yours truly). It was quite eventful – like all 9 am presentations I have done. Thakur had to present first and speak of how subliminal advertising came to be (the famous eat popcorn, drink coke story), how companies have used it thus far, and theories supporting it. I was supposed to talk about why it won’t work, theories which do not support it so on and so forth.

In case you don’t know, Subliminal Advertising the concept of putting arbit high recall pictures within normal images be it print or an AV. In Fight Club – this was one of Tyler’s’ many jobs – when he inserts porn (not so mild versions of it) between normal movie scenes for kicks ( ok - it was not advertising, but was subliminal nevertheless). In print, it is mostly a small part of an image – the ice cubes in the glass of booze looking like a couple having sex or a skull and so on. But mostly, it is about sex. The theory says that while we don’t recognize these images as they are, our subconscious mind recognizes them and prompts a purchase over other normal looking ads which do not have people having sex, etc in miniature print. This seemed like an interesting thing to work on, like most things do in a B School until the work arrives.

I woke up at 8.30 and finished the last 2 of my 4 slides. It looked alright. My part was ready. I then started looking for Thakur, who wasn’t to be found anywhere (Why I didn’t call her might be a very good question to ask at this point of time, but in true Dan Brown style, I just wanted to tell you using this parenthesis that is going to unveil later). At 8.55 am, I gave up looking and headed for class. I had a feeling I would find her there. I was slightly tense about not having found her. Adding to the tension was the fact that – apart from having discussed the topic (the previous night, of course), and deciding broadly who would be doing what (I vaguely remembered Thakur telling it to me while I was playing AOE), we had not done very much else with respect to “discussing”.

But the good thing is Thakur was also there on her way to class. She yelled at me for not picking my phone. I put the sheepish grin, and she realized it too. My phone would be lying under a heap of clothes, what not in my room ( if at all)– and no way anyone would find it. In all my B School life, I would have found it twice, and not once when I needed it. The good thing though, was that she had finished her part too. Excellent! So the presentation was ready. It was 9.05 as the prof (who in this case also happened to be the Director, affectionately known by all as ‘Diro’) walked into class. I was really hoping that he would take attendance, giving us sometime at least. Instead, he walked upto one of the empty students’ chairs, sat down and said out loud, “group number (whatever our group number was)”. This is approximately when both of us (Thakur and I, members of the group) were frantically asking fellow junta for the device the pen drive.

Diro, in the meantime, was tapping his fingers and all this, in general added to my tension as many ideas ran through my brain.

Should we go ahead and present it from different laptops? -

Should Thakur just start now (oh wait, she cant, no one has put the projector on, bloody CRs!!)?

Why cant I just copy paste it from one ppt to the other, how stupid am I – should have thought about it earlier??!

Somewhere in between these thoughts Diro had once said “Why is your presentation not ready yet?” To which Thakur answered something. Obviously, that was not a good or a funny answer because Diro retorted with “you lose 10 marks for starting late”, and did not smile/seem amused.

So I had just finished setting the projector, and Thakur had finished copying the presentations on to one sane laptop. And we started presenting the presentation titled “Subliminal Advertising”. It was an encouraging start, since we started with only half the junta asleep. 5 minutes into the presentation, the numbers of people who were sleeping had increased only by one, which is very good by any 9 am class standards. Thankfully, both of us spoke about the similar stuff on subliminal advertising. As in, if you spend less than an hour on a presentation, you won’t go beyond the first three or four hits Google throws up – so our sources were the same. We concluded that “A lot of companies use Subliminal Advertising, but no one can really be sure if it increases sales”. Diro was also fairly impressed.

Now why would I write about something like this almost a year and a half after it happened? Because I saw this in one of my favourite malls in Gurgaon.

There is slightly more to it than meets the eye, but don’t look too hard. I don’t think the Fashion Cube guys do it intentionally. I think their creative brief was on the lines of “ Er.. nothing complicated– give us the average bikini babe who can sell anything, we are keeping options open currently”. But I am sure they ended up getting more than they asked for, at least from people like me and the people I show it to :-).

There is also a theory about subliminal advertising which says that it is endorsed by people who have nothing else to do in their free time. These juntas, the theory says, interrogate images for hours till twisted patterns emerge from it, and then feel much contended at the way the last hour was spent. What are the chances some of them have taken to blogging?

The adventure called “going to office”

So, of the many ways available to go to office every morning, I use the cycle rickshaw. Why so? Some of you may wonder, while making mental notes about bringing it up with me the next time I put lecture on cruelty against animals due to animal carts and retort with “Technically speaking, man is also an animal and you use cycle rickshaw. You Cruel Hypocritical Monster!!!” Yes – I know - It is not a pretty sight.

But coming back to - “why so?”, the answer, apart from the fact that I want to feel like Pierce Bronsan in the Visa ad, is that – my office is in Gurgaon. The other available means of transport are walking and driving to office. The six wheeled dugdugi, thankfully, does not ply on my office road. I do not walk to office since I do not have a particularly great brown wardrobe to compliment my brown shoes and brown hair (shoes of any colour would end up brown if you walk in Gurgaon at the time junta drives to office. The same applies to hair) and so I choose this option only for going back home.

I do not drive because

1. Too much traffic and cycle rickshaws are clearly faster than cars – especially on footpaths and sideways.

2. Since spending quality time inside a car with yourself while head banging to the Punjabi songs with English lyrics on Delhi FM stations and looking around at assorted junta in larger assortments of cars doing the same is bad enough; repeating the same exercise again in the basement parking would be, well, worse.

3. And, slightly more pertinently, I don’t have a car.

This is how the action begins – I find an empty rickshaw guy who is lazing around and tell him “Cyber Green”. He then stares back at me as if nothing has happened. In the beginning I repeated the destination giving him more details about where exactly I need to go, thinking that he has not heard it, but I was mistaken. While gazing blankly at you, he is computing the shortest path to your destination from where ever you are. The shortest path, is literally - the shortest path. It is the straight line joining where you are now to where you want to go. Sometimes, this path includes a part of a real road – but that is purely a coincidence. And some more times, it includes a large part of a real road which is a one way with the general direction of traffic being in your opposite direction. Such as this –

and -















But these are only minor inconveniences, and are thwarted away by the rickshaw walla with the same practiced ease a teetotaler, such as myself, would thwart the possible choice of drinks a waiter at watering hole would suggest - “Yes, in that case – One fresh lime soda sweet and salt with extra sweet please”. A “One Way” in Gurgaon is almost like a feel good thing for the rickshaw guys, not really a rule.

But there are rules the rickshaw wallas do follow – such as “If the space between two cars is sufficiently large for the front tire to squeeze through, the remainder of the rickshaw will follow” – well it may not sound like a rule to you, didn’t to me either – but given the way its followed, it made me to believe that must be one. Another important one - “He who shouts loudest has the right of way, unless of course, “he” is one of the many friendly neighbourhood bulls generally chilling out on the highway like “he” does during most peak traffic hours – in which case “he” ( as in the bull ) *always* has right of way”. And many more of which I am sure to find out during my stay here in Gurgaon.

One of the best things about Rickshaws, which I forgot to mention till now, is that it makes many people’s dreams come true. Ok, I am exaggerating a bit there, may not be many people – but it did make Mihir’s dream come true – at least a small part of it. My dear colleague and flat mate had always wanted to be a terrorist. After doing an MBA, he realized that it did not score very highly as a career option. So he became a Sales and Marketing guy. But the little child in him was very dejected because he didn’t end up as a terrorist (just like the little child in me is dejected because I didn’t end up as the opening bowler, batsmen and best one day captain India ever produced who takes India to 4 World Cup wins, 3 of them against Australia - but that’s a different story altogether). That’s until he came to Gurgaon and discovered the rickshaws. He realized that if he used them to work everyday, given the pollution, dust, etc - he could dress up like the terrorist he always wanted to be, and not be mistaken for a real one.

One of these days, he tells me, he will be buying one of those real looking AK – 47s. The rickshaw guys should really get some PR done to highlight these efforts – they are otherwise mistaken by most junta as guys who ferry fellow junta from one place to another.