Are we ready to Eat Milk?

Utterly Butterly, delicious Amul. The chubby little girl in the red polka dotted dress manages to humourously twist any event without offending anyone, unlike contemporary humour. The Amul girl made memes cool decades before the term and concept of meme officially came into existence.

On your 100 gm butter or the newspaper, the Amul ads will never fail to make you smile. Although it's just about butter, which is only one of the products that the milk industry giant offers, when you say Amul, the adorable girl is the first image that flashes in the head.

 Last Sunday, Amul went overboard promoting the Eat Milk campaign in the Times of India. My brother was flipping through the numerous ads when I happened to notice one of these. 'It's a meme! Is that an Amul ad?' I exclaimed, 'and it's actually a representation of the socially awesome meme,' I told him with a little less enthusiasm as before, 'and it is in the newspaper... wasn't it just a Facebook/9gag thing to gain likes and stuff with such memes?' I thought to myself. 

It was over a short discussion with the Dude of the office the next day, when we both realised we weren't really impressed this time. 

The thing about Amul is, when they've created something like the Amul girl and 'Piyo glassful doodh', you wouldn't expect their ads to be missed easily. Maybe, they thought they could go a step ahead with the meme-approach in the newspaper to grab eyeballs.

The Eat Milk campaign

The Eat Milk campaign is borrowed heavily from the Got Milk?' campaign. You can say that because of two obvious observations - the milk moustache in both the ads and the aim to increase the sale of milk/milk products. That isn't bad really, considering Got Milk only spoke about the 'goodness' of milk and wasn't very humourous with the content. What bothers me is that for a company who set the bar so high with the Amul girl, suddenly decides to take the extremely commonplace meme route where the memes kind of lack punch. The idea is commendable, the execution, maybe not that much.

The Got Milk campaign

From among the people who noticed the campaign in the newspaper, some seemed to like it a lot, while most others trashed it. I wouldn't want to sound biased here, but my brother who is an ardent fan of the Amul girl for as long as I remember and my father, who doesn't miss the little girl's ads in the newspaper, both saw the ads but did not seem to register them for long. By long, I mean they turned pages without really stopping to read the ads. It was pretty evident that the ads had very little impact on them.

Piyo Glassful Doodh!

Hope the campaign gets a little more interesting in the future - if they plan to continue with the memes, that is. Otherwise, Amul is synoymous with 'awesome' for me where the advertisements are concerned.

Social network diary - 2

Dear Diary,

This isn't about what happened on Twitter or Facebook today. This is about what happened in the Delhi Metro. It was after really long that I decided to travel to the other part of the Universe - from Noida to Rajouri Garden. On my way back, I was stuck between two females who were constantly fiddling with their phones.

Female 1 was calling someone called Vishu Baby. Yes, I'm the girl you'll find peeping into other people's phones. The conversation was oh so exciting. Vishu Baby was Female 1's fiancee from the past one week. The discussion was about which picture to choose as the profile picture on Facebook.

'Aap to pata nahi kahan dekh re the poora time.'
'Nahi, us photo mein main kaisi kaali si hoon.'
'Nahi na, aap kaun si photo dekh re ho, isme mera mooh khula hai, aisi photo kaun lagata hai?'
'Acha suno, aap ke baal us photo mein ache lag rahe the jo aapne shaadi ke liye bheji thi Singapore ki. Ab aapke baal jhadd rahe hain kya?'
'Arey, aap ko wo picture nahi mili jo maine mail ki thi? Usme mere photos ache the.'
'Haan wo greater noida wale bhaiya ne naa saare photos FB pe daal diye. Ye kya baat hui, sagaai meri aur excitemaant unko ho gayi.'
'Acha to aap select karo na kaun si upload karni hai picture.'

Female 2 on the other hand, was scrolling through her FB timeline like a maniac. She occasionally enlarged any picture of her male friends. A few seconds later she was checking out memes but not laughing. She probably didn't get the jokes. She kept scrolling down until she reached a female friend's birthday album and zoomed in and out thrice at every picture. This was followed by a quick call to another female friend. 'Ewwwww, what was she wearing?' which was followed by a long post-mortem of her dress and character and other friends she had invited.

Diary, Facebook is a great way to waste your time offline by discussing about it.

Never create an FB account for yourself, diary.

I love you,
Oinkoo.

Social network diary - 1

Dear Diary,

Twitter contests will be the death of twitter.

From 'Why twitter contests? Why are brands hi-jacking trends?' to 'What the hell, you're also playing these stupid twitter contests?' to 'Eww, I don't talk to people who play these contests.' to 'Fake hai ye contests, their own people are winning, it's fixed!' to 'Oh shit! Look, a racist won.' to 'Oooh, they've roped her in to promote it.' to 'OMG! SHE CREATED FAKE ACCOUNTS TO WIN!' I think the next step would be 'She stole the stuff that girl won online by hacking into her account and giving them her own address.'

What is this happening to twitter? Wasn't it all about observing people and exaggerating situations to make them sound funny in order to gain followers? I was here to share obnoxious stuff I couldn't tell people to their face and be a coward and tweet them instead. In between all this some people found it funny and started following me and re-tweeting me. Then came the pressure to be funnier and the hunger for more followers. A little disappointment over unfollows and tweet-chors and pretty DPs gaining more popularity and followers than me.

Diary, this post is going no where. Let's not lose sleep over it. Nobody knows about any of these issues in the real world except a couple of thousands of us. I can't discuss it with anyone else. Hence, I write to you.

I love you,
Oinkoo.