Please Consult the Asterisk Before Buying

Indian television advertising has entered a beautiful phase of civilisation where toothpaste has stopped being toothpaste and become a colour experiment. Purple toothpaste will whiten your teeth, black charcoal will make your skin fair, blue detergent will make white clothes whiter and green tea will apparently negotiate with your waistline until it agrees to become smaller. At this rate, we only need a yellow shampoo that promises a fat bank balance. The product can remain ordinary. The colour must do the hard work.

The purple toothpaste is particularly impressive. Nobody has yet explained why purple, but advertising does not believe in such unnecessary details. Purple goes in, white comes out. There is probably a PhD somewhere that says this. If not, there will be one after the next agency meeting. Put two test tubes behind a model, add a person in a white coat and say “advanced formula” and suddenly chemistry becomes a matter of faith. We are not buying toothpaste anymore. We are buying confidence in a laboratory we have never seen. Then there is the slimming tea. The model drinking it has a waistline so delicate that one strong Mumbai breeze could put her in the next suburb. She takes a sip, looks satisfied and gives us the impression that the tea has personally evicted all the calories from her body. The rest of us watch this on our sofas while having our fourth biscuit and think, perhaps the tea works better with biscuits. 

Hope is a powerful ingredient.

Protein supplements have gone one step further. We now have men with shoulders broad enough to require municipal permission telling us how two scoops transformed their lives. Two scoops? Of course. Nothing to do with the gym, the diet, the trainer or the fact that their body appears to have been assembled by a contractor with an unlimited budget. And because apparently protein alone is not dramatic enough, one advertisement managed to bring the ex-girlfriend into the story so the current girlfriend could look like the improved model. Imagine being someone's ex and discovering years later that your relationship has become a comparative advantage for a sugar-free protein powder. The ad is as lousy as it looks, never mind if the protein powder is a catchy phrase for today’s youth (and old). 

This is a long way from Lalitaji. She could sell (blue) detergent without making anyone feel that their marriage, complexion, waistline or romantic history required professional intervention. The old jalebi advertisements had family, affection and enough syrup to make the dentist nervous, but nobody needed to be insulted to sell a packet of something. Today, every product appears to begin by announcing that something is terribly wrong with us. Your skin needs help. Your teeth need help. Your stomach needs help. Your clothes need help. Your relationship may need a protein shake. Fortunately, the advertiser has arrived with the solution, neatly packed and available in three sizes.

And then there is the little asterisk, advertising's most honest employee. The commercial announces, “Whitens teeth!” and the asterisk whispers, “Results may vary.” “Lose weight fast!” followed by, “Results may vary.” “Clinically proven!” followed by some microscopic sentence that presumably says, “Clinically proven somewhere, by somebody, under conditions we strongly recommend you do not investigate.” The main claim gets the full screen. The truth gets a font size suitable for a cockroach with excellent eyesight. The asterisk deserves an award. Every evening it is sent into battle against claims involving fairness, fitness, freshness, whiteness, brightness and apparently marital compatibility. It is the only employee in advertising who seems to know what is actually happening.

But advertising has become more inventive than television. It now follows us into our phones. Search for shoes once and your phone remembers the shoes longer than you remember your own password. Ignore them and they return. Look at another pair and suddenly both pairs are waiting for you. Buy a completely unrelated shirt and the shoes are still there, looking personally offended. “We thought you liked us.” No, I was browsing. OTT platforms have perfected this too. We pay for entertainment and then spend the evening being told what else we should watch. Our devices know what we searched, what we bought and what we nearly bought. Privacy has become an increasingly charming concept, like free parking in South Mumbai. Everybody talks about it. Nobody can find it. The real comedy is that advertising has begun selling us the idea that being normal is an unacceptable condition. We are too dark, too fat, too thin, too dull, too sweaty, too unorganised, too inadequately proteinised. There is always a deficiency. The good news is that the deficiency comes in a bottle, tube, sachet or attractive little box.

Perhaps that is why the best advertisements are still the ones that know they are advertisements. Give us the nonsense. Give us the impossible transformation. Make us laugh. We can handle a detergent claiming to make a shirt whiter than white because, frankly, nobody is taking that shirt to Parliament as evidence. Just do not make us feel like a failed human being before offering the packet. Because a good advertisement should make us remember the product. A clever one should make us laugh. The truly dangerous one makes us believe that our perfectly ordinary life is a problem that can be solved at the supermarket.

And if none of the claims work, don't worry. There is always the asterisk. Tiny, loyal and apparently carrying the entire truth of Indian advertising on its back. Poor thing. It deserves a hair raising (tale). Perhaps drenched in yellow shampoo.