You win without models

November 22, 2016 02:52 am | Updated 02:52 am IST

So you are in love with this lovely girl and would even like to marry her. Yes, she’s the girl everyone loves to love. Hey, what’s she doing endorsing wall paint? Sure enough, we would heed her advice on playing badminton or about starring in popular “family entertainers”. But why wall paint?

The world of modelling and advertising are full of such paradoxes. Most of the time they are subtly telling the young ladies they are in some way inadequate, not good enough. The other girl is prettier than you. Young lasses lap up all this, little realising that gradually they see themselves as not being up to the mark, thereby inducing even a sense of guilt. Implied also in the message is that the products can improve the state of affairs.

But far too many lacunae in the advertisements get glossed over. The average model is at least four inches taller than normal. Anorexia is often the bridesmaid of their extreme dieting and irregular food habits. What’s more, the pictures you see in the advertisements are further touched up.

As a wag remarked, “You cannot look like Angelina Jolie; even Angelina Jolie cannot look like the Angelina in the picture.” The list of anorexics among the celebrities is way too long to be elaborated here. The messages start pounding the fairer sex from their junior school stage, and could go well into their forties.

What gets my goat is that I am a mental health professional who necessarily spends time trying to iron out peoples’ negative cognition. I exhort them to systematically remove the complexes, till the time they come to realise it is their self-belief and good cheer that are going to see them through. I patiently seek to ingrain into my clients that beauty is not only in the eye of the beholder, but also is a reflection of a calm and balanced psyche. And here come tsunamis of diametrically opposite concepts!

What, then, can be done? Should not the advertisements be catching the eye? Quite right! You can’t tell the world that your product is only a tiny bit better than your competitors’, and expect to come up trumps. An endorsement for a cola cannot say, even if it has a grain of truth in it, “Prepare to meet thy doom.” It will be more apt to hear that from a pulpit or during a religious discourse. But we have a naughty little girl who comes out with a pithy line or two every fortnight, for decades now. This girl wearing a polka-dot skirt, with a mischievous little smile, is the brand ambassador for Amul. Amul beats all the competing multinationals hands down. Some noteworthy initiatives like the Rubicon Creative of Chennai have also proved their worth in the world of advertisements without the aid of models.

Periodicals and the electronic media would be hard hit without revenue from those advertisements. Again, far too much of a good thing, I am afraid: huge ads, full page ads, double full page ads. A doctor friend recently told me that he did a surgical strike the other day. He took a scalpel and removed the advertisements and the paid news, and the magazine was pared down to half the original size! Self-belief and the quality of your work are going to win the day for you in the long run.

kuruvila2004@yahoo.com

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