TV ads are becoming creepy

It began for me with the advertisements for vehicle tires. There was a relatively recent one in which Aamir Khan’s character does ridiculous things on the road, like driving down the wrong side like it was the right side, setting off firecrackers and spilling recklessly into it with a group of dancers at a wedding, in every case forcing people in vehicles to depend entirely on the performance of their tires and brakes to avoid injuring/killing someone.

Ads like this caricatured what we had internalised by then – that traffic discipline in urban India was such a lost cause that we, the people pining for this change, were better off adapting to the shenanigans of these supposedly intractable people instead.

In just the first three months of 2022, however, this cynicism towards change seems to have ballooned past the thin line between the ‘us’ and the ‘them’ that the tire manufacturers pretended existed, with the manufacturers claiming to help the ‘us’. Instead, in many ads today, the companies are collectively one party, the ‘us’ from their points of view, and the rest of us the ‘them’.

This perspective seems to encourage consumers to give in to their inner cynics and cowards, as the case may be, and submit to what the companies have to offer. Four examples come swiftly to mind.

There is Magicpin, in which people brawling on the street – and in a subsequent edition a suit-clad man riding in on a battle tank – politely ask a befuddled onlooker to point his camera instead at nearby stores where he can shop at a discount.