Airtel et al, Pt.4

The way in which telecom companies advertise in India is striking. Visual motifs, catchy slogans, and young icons are effectively combined in such a way as to build a progressive-sounding, forward-looking and apparently self-evident exhortation toward the consumption of the latest, greatest technologies of communication. Like many phenomena in contemporary India, these ads afford a good picture of ‘traditional’ and ‘modern’ value systems at work/odds/play, etc.

Airtel, my own mobile service provider, currently advances a campaign for its mobile 2.0 products in the person of India’s cricket captain, Mahendra Singh Dhoni. [See previous post, IPL2, Pt.1]. “It’s time to move on,” Airtel, as Dhoni, tells consumers, recalling the way a mother would chastise a child who clings to inappropriate forms of behavior out of a failure to ‘grow up’. By the rhetorical shape of the request, those viewers who aren’t prepared to acquire a Blackberry or comparable device are cast as either immature, reactionary, or (far more blasphemously, perhaps) just plain uncool and thoroughly out-of-step with today’s India.

An even more evocative ad is that which peddles Airtel’s broadband services. While the slogan “Impatience is the new life” might seem a bit juvenile or incoherent to readers of this blog, it nonetheless speaks eloquently to the vernacular (if sometimes garbled) aspirations of young, Western-oriented India.


The latest fashion, technology, and pop culture have almost unassailable appeal to young Indians of almost any class or caste, and as best I can tell the rhetorical accessories attached to them are of secondary importance, if not inconsequential. (In certain cases, the same could be argued for the aesthetics of the commodities’ themselves — one sometimes wonders if what they signify doesn’t trump what they are.)


Regardless of these slogans’ actual efficacy, it seems clear that they are deliberately cultivated to sound slangy, poppy, and just plain new. In another example, a Samsung Mobile ad campaign centers on the agog-though-intrigued sentiment captured in the phrase “Next is what?” It’s another expression that catches native speakers of American English a little off-guard – do they mean ‘What’s next?’ — though it seems to effectively capture the edge-of-the-seat alertness that these advertisements seek to instill in their audiences. More than that, however, the slogan advances a bourgeois eagerness to snap up the latest innovation. It bears a distinct whiff (even by the standards of this blog post) of a concern for ’staying up with the Joneses’, or ‘Mukherjees’ or ‘Singhs’, as the case may be.

An equally trenchant Vodafone ad campaign, “Make the most of now”, challenges consumers to embrace the moment and its conventions in order to live as fully as possible, or something. (Was ‘Make the most of the moment’ taken? How about ‘Make the most of today’? ‘…the present’ maybe?) Simultaneously, the ‘Open up to…’ rhetoric casts disinclined viewers as closed-off, entrenched and anti-progressive. For some reason I can’t imagine technological products and services being advertised in the US with the same level of ‘get with it’ attitude. Issues of ‘backwardness’ seldom crowd the practical focus of US ads, at least in my recollection. (Readers are encouraged to submit examples of advertisements that challenge this interpretation.)

Another tight example can be found in an SMS I received from Airtel yesterday. I see the same focus on notions of social flux, and the same lionization of that agile individual who stays abreast of the latest developments in technology and society, promptly consumes them, and fully embodies them:

If you don’t like
something,
change it; if you
can’t change it,
change the way
you think about
it. Life is all
about change.
Forward it to
your friends
Sender:
AT-Promo

Five minutes of googling suggests that the part preceding the sentence which I’ve emphasized is attributed to children’s book author Mary Engelbreit, though it has a Rilke-like sound to it, and there are a sufficient number of variations to make it seem like it could have come from anywhere. In any case, this apparently cute, tidy truism cum message of affirmation, in hinting at the rapidly changing, incomparably edgy nature (and overwhelming momentum) of late modern technologized existence, might also also comment obliquely on the ‘arbitrary’ make-up of ‘unchanging’ tradition — and its consequently diminished importance in the dynamic world of 2009.

If all these advertisements share a set of common goals, it might be (1) to cast technology-fired development as inevitable for India, and the consonant social effects as irreversible and unfathomably deep, (2) to portray the less-than-frenzied personal uptake of technology as naive and probably reactionary, (3) to uproot ‘traditional’, community-centered notions of property ownership and material life, and (4) to depict the ascendancy of the schedule-optimizing, profit-maximizing individual as wholly irresistible. In their attempt to bring those Indians who aren’t yet yuppy technophiles into the ambit of post-industrial capitalist materialism — and operating, as they are, in an era of crumbling ancestral values and amnesiac meaning-making — these ads link the pursuit of self-actualization with the consumption and embodiment of technology.

Keeping that in mind, here’s a final ad for you to marvel at, by Nokia and starring that Bollywood diva that can do no wrong by me, Priyanka Chopra (of Pond’s White Beauty fame): “…it’s who we are.“

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