ADS: LYING CREATIVELY?

There was a very interesting commercial shown on the television sometime back. The advertisement was about the promotion of a ceiling fan. The commercial started with a simple looking person going to a shop that was selling electrical goods. He wants to buy a fan and asks the shopkeeper to show him a good fan that meets his needs of both quality and cost. The shopkeeper shows a fan of a certain company and recommends the brand to him suggesting that it matches all the features that he is looking for. Before taking a decision the man asks a final question as to what is the main reason the shop keeper is recommending it. The shopkeeper says it has PSPO. Naturally, being unable to decipher the meaning of the term the man innocently asks what is this PSPO. And all hell breaks loose as if the man has committed a cardinal sin by not knowing what PSPO is. The people all around look at him with contempt, shouting that he doesn’t know PSPO. The ad was popular and effective but the question remains what is this PSPO. Well, there was a fancy coinage given to unscramble the acronym, though whatever that meant may again be open to interpretation.

However, someone once asked the ad guru who had created this punch line — woh PSPO nahin janta (he doesn’t know PSPO) — as to what the acronym meant. The rather witty retort was that even he didn’t know. Moral of the story? Try to remember the same, age-old, school-time adage our grammar books had taught us — look before you leap. In the present case, it means don’t buy anything just on the basis the claims made by the seller. And not just products. Even the ideas. In fact, in the present times ideas are proving more harmful than the products because they have a far longer shelf life than the products. Moreover, for the claims made by marketers promoting a product there are certain regulating agencies like the Advertising Standards Control of India (ASCI). Recently, the ASCI upheld complaints against 200 misleading ads out of over 300 advertisements of top companies that were pointed out relating to subjects like healthcare, education, etc. But what about the ideas that political parties propagate or even the many religious gurus proclaim. Well, the masses are gullible and they can be misled by those falsifications, the proclamations which the innocent may buy. Educating the masses may not be easy and well-nigh impossible. Do we not need some kind of a monitoring on the claims and the promises which are made? Lying has always been regarded as a sin. But what about institutional lying which the political parties are resorting to. Former British PM and statesman had in a rather tongue-in-check remark once said that there are three kinds of lies — lies, damn lies and statistics.

He probably forgot about the fourth and the damnest of the lies — politics. It has the maximum impact on the maximum number. It was for this reason that politics without principles was mentioned as one of the seven deadly sins by Gandhi. The saving grace, however, is that as former US President Lincoln had said, you can fool some people all the time, all the people sometime, but not all the people all the time. Nevertheless, watch those advertisements promising you the moon.