Media Monday- Mystery behind the Indian Govt Ad revealed!

Since I have got your attention now let me confess that the headline is a gimmick :), and the person behind cracking the Indian Govt Ad issue is none other than yours truely! For past 4-5 days all news channels bugged my ears broadcasting the news of a full-page newspaper advertisements from ‘The Women and Child development Ministry’ against female feticide with the picture of a former Pakistani air chief adorning it. I was not getting the motive behind such furor as I always thought that it’s another ‘Aman Ki Asha’ campaign’s marketing strategy [please don’t raise eyebrows :)]!

I think the Congress got it all wrong. If they had someone from media working for them as a strategist they could have very easily turned this (big) mistake into something revolutionary.

Imagine this- ‘The Govt could have issued a public notice saying they did that ad to show that act for such good causes can bring 2 countries together’.. whoa..what an idea sirjee! And with TOI other news papers could have also come forward saying that they support such initiatives.

Now let’s move away from my brilliant advice to Govt and try to understand the possible reason behind such a mistake (I’m left with no choice but to call it a mistake, the Govt lost its chance to turn this around). It’s not a rocket science to understand the process of printing such an ad- As the Govt officials said they outsourced the concept and design of the advertisement to a private agency.

A private agency? Who knows better than me how such agencies work :)? It’s very simple- what you need for an ad? A concept, some text, some images and some logos, that’s it. Understand the typical work of a designer who has to create and stick images to the main ad- Find relevant images from “Google Image Search”, get the text from editors and use Photoshop to give it a perfect look.

Designers are always obsessed to use the pic they find appealing, it’s not the mistake of that poor designer who couldn’t find any other Indian officer’s image which was appealing enough (Or probably he cared the least to find the real name of the person from the link he copied the image)! If you see that ad, the only eye-Cather in that advertisement is ‘Pakistani’ Air Chief’s image (all other faces are fairly common to our eyes). That may probably be the only reason why that ad got noticed and our Govt should actually be happy about this :).

What do you think about such goof ups? On one hand  it looks like a serious issue, but on the other it’s the message which should have been in news rather than the ad. It looks like our media got it all wrong- what’s your take?

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Author: rabigupta

Rabi Gupta is a start up enthusiast and Founder of iDubba.com (Intelligent Box). He is passionate about new and interesting ideas in media and entertainment field.  Read more of his stuff at blog.idubba.com or follow him on twitter as @idubba.

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Tagged as: air chief, development ministry, female feticide, google, govt officials, indian govt, private agency, relevant images, rocket science, typical work