Advertisements are necessary and they are fun to watch too. We all remember that one advertisement that we watched while growing up that stuck with us and kept replaying in our heads all the time. We feel advertisements today have lost that appeal because competition comes before creativity with most advertisers doing anything to glorify their products.
We asked a few people around town which has been their least favorite advertisement in the recent times.
Sunita Acharya, Entrepreneur
I wouldn’t really call it a bad commercial but there is this one advertisement that I came across recently and I found it to be very funny. It’s an advert for a cooking oil. Madan Krishna Shrestha and Hari Bansha Acharya star in it and it starts out with a shot of Hari Bansha actively searching for purity everywhere he goes. There is a background voice chanting ‘Hari le k khojdai cha?’ during this entire sequence and halfway through the ad, Hari Bansha comes across Baba Madan Krishna who tells him that it isn’t that difficult to find purity and presents him with a packet of Baba oil. It’s a silly commercial that always makes me laugh. It’s fun to watch but it’s not very creative.
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Gyanendra Rai, Entrepreneur
I think any commercial that is misleading and shows a stronger and more efficient version of the product (it is advertising) is bad. These kinds of commercials only build up false hope and using the products later on is really disappointing. A lot of Google pop up ads fall under this category. I also don’t like the way e-cigarettes are advertised as advertisers claim it’ll help even chain smokers quit smoking but it doesn’t work that way. These sorts of misleading commercials might help the brands sell their products to new customers but they won’t be able to retain those customers in the long run. I think advertisements need to be creative and sincere at the same time.
Aagya Awale, Student
There is one ad I saw on YouTube recently that shocked me and it has stuck with me. There was a commercial of a Chinese detergent powder, Qiaobi, where a girl puts a black man inside a washing machine and after the wash, he turns white. She, for a lack of better words, “cleans” him and rids him of his “blackness”. I found this to be very racist. I think the rest of the world did to. It implied that if you are black, you are dirty and need to be cleaned, which was horrible to say the least. The whole ad is actually quite disturbing to watch. I kind of understand what the advertisers were trying to do, but they couldn’t have been more off in conveying the message.
Sonish Adhikari, Student
It was a commercial for Camlin permanent marker. It starts with a remote village where a man is dying. It is said that when a husband dies, the wife’s bindi has to be erased by other women in the village. But as her husband takes his last breath and women try to remove her bindi, it sticks to the skin. Turns out the husband had used a red Camlin marker to put the bindi on her. The ad was wrong on so many levels I can’t help but cringe every time I think about it. I can’t wrap my head around how sensitive issues are portrayed with such insensitivity in most advertisements that we see today.
Archana Bista, Gastroenterologist
I remember watching this German commercial a few months ago that I thought was very racist and didn’t even make sense to me. The advert is for the DIY-store chain Hornbach and it shows some German men working in the fields. Then a few scientists show up and package their dirty and sweaty clothes. Then, we see an East Asian woman buying this package from a vending machine and smelling it. The company later stated that the commercial was showing ‘an ultra-modern fictional city’ and how people there would enjoy the smell of Earth but I don’t think that was their initial intention while making the commercial. I thought of the ad as crudeness masquerading as ‘creativity’.
Chirag Majithia, Writer
I have seen quite a few bad commercials. But the worst one so far is titled “Freedom Is Basic” by Hoodies. The commercial begins with women wearing burkas. Background music starts playing and the screen shows the words, “It’s all about Freedom”. Then the women take the burka off. This ad implied that Islamic women wearing burka means that they are not given freedom. I believe these matters should be handled with the sensitivity they deserve. I believe that we must respect all the religions before coming up with conclusions, making an ad, and calling the practices of a particular religion wrong. The ad was discontinued but it’s still something that bothers me.
