Virat Kohli is a veritable Greek god in the new innerwear ad just released for his signature range One8. For one, the ad is beautifully shot. Two, the subject Captain Kohli, has a body sculpted to perfection; the abs and the muscles show an athlete at 100 per cent fitness; the tattoos further add the macho to the man. Anything he wears on that super-fit body is really incidental!
Kohli reminisces about how he used to be called hotheaded, arrogant, temperamental and what have you. Actually, all he was in reality was restless; restless to perform; restless to show the world what I was made of. Hence, restless became his comfort; and he has always stayed restless. And, the new One8 innerwear is Comfort for the Restless. The ad, as I said earlier, is a visual delight.
The camera literally kisses and caresses Kohli’s frame and celebrating the body art. Kohli plays himself. Self confident. Self possessed. Self laudatory. The brand is about him. He is the brand. He knows that. The camera knows that. And finally, that is all that matters. I don’t know who the agency is, but whoever they are, they’ve done a very good job.
After a good One8 performance, the law of averages catches up with Kohli. His endorsement of Wellman vitamins is the dullest and most boring ad I have seen in a long long time. A big yaaawn! It is an 80s day-in-the-life-of kind of segment, from Kohli waking up in the morning to his push-ups, his jog, his day full of meetings to the usual… Kohli sleepwalks through the routine looking dreadfully bored, disinterested and demotivated. He perhaps looks his brightest in the end frame mouthing the brand’s promise of staying physically fit and mentally sharp. A wasted ad.
Two very cute ads this week that I really liked, however, were also in 80s mould. So, it is not the 80s that are to be faulted. I loved an ad by Bausch and Lomb for its iconnect range of contact lenses. Titled #BlameTheFrame, it opens on a young man looking to take a selfie with a cut-out of Nargis Fakhri. He takes out his spectacles to click the picture. As he’s doing so he notices a lady coming his way. He hands her his phone and asks her for a picture.
The lady obliges, starts to pose for the picture, but then realises that the young man doesn’t want her in the frame but the Fakhri cut-out. She clicks the picture and moves on, a bit annoyed. The young man can’t clearly see the picture, dons his spectacles again to get a clearer view and is mighty pleased at his achievement.
Of course, what he completely misses is that in juggling his glasses and the phone he never really looked far enough to see that the lady who clicked the picture was the real Nargis Fakhri! So, opportunity lost because he wasn’t wearing Bausch and Lomb contact lenses. It is a cute little ad reminiscent of one of those lost souls in Hindi movies of the 70s or 80s. The man without the lenses misses the girl.
It is the Shahrukh Khan (SRK) ad for ICICI Banking services that really freaked me out. SRK plays Pingale, an accountant. But his character looks exactly like Surinder Sahni in Rab Ne Bana Di Jodi. I am a die-hard SRK fan and I found his entire get-up, his mannerisms and his acting so endearing that it didn’t matter what he was selling. I would buy anything from him. Pingale keeps popping up in the busy life of his boss with small, petty day-to-day work related problems. Overdraft. Vendor payments. Bank reconciliation. Pingale finally suggests a way out: The ICICI InstaBiz account as a solution to all these minor but real hassles. It is done effortlessly, the script is good and the superstar has been well used.
That is what it is all about. You can hire a great celebrity, but you must know what to do with that famous face. More so since many brands are also using the same big name. The Wellman ad is a disaster. The One8 ad is a delight. Both use Kohli. One does it badly; one does it very well. The Nargis Fakhri ad is well done too. The SRK ad is absolutely outstanding. It uses SRK at what he is best — playful, charming, friendly — attributes the brand too surely wants to exploit and wants consumers to associate with its services. Well, the ICICI ad adequately does its bit.