SAJAforum

ADVERTISING: Heinecken TV spot, "The Date" features Bollywood song

This is the video of Heinecken's new ad, "The Date," which features a lip-synced version of a Bollywood song:

And here's the original song, "Jaan Pehechaan Ho," from the 1965 Hindi film, "Gumnaam":

TV: Webcasts with stars of NBC "Outsourced" + reality TV

[ shortcut to this post: http://bit.ly/sajaTV ]

SAJA, the South Asian Journalists Association, and SAMMA, South Asians in Media, Marketing and Entertainment Association, present the latest in their series of high-profile webcasts - via BlogTalkRadio.com - with some of the leading South Asian names in global media, arts, entertainment, politics and much more...  

Listen to recordings of two SAJA & SAMMA TV-related webcasts. Both are below: One with folks from "Outsourced" and the other with stars of reality TV.

===>Meet stars Rizwan Manji, Parvesh Cheena and Sacha Dhawan, executive producer Robert Borden and writer Geetika Lizardi of NBC's "Outsourced":

Listen to internet radio with SAJA HQ on Blog Talk Radio

==> The Reality TV discussion, with three South Asian reality stars:

Listen to internet radio with SAJA HQ on Blog Talk Radio

Wednesday, March 30, 2011: A conversation with several South Asians who made waves in reality shows in recent years.

• Photographer Nigel Barker (@beautyequation)- "America's Next Top Model" judge
  
• Singer Anoop Desai (@anoopdoggdesai)- "American Idol" contestant - finished in 6th place in 2009
• Chef Maneet Chauhan of Vermilion in NY & Chicago - "Next Iron Chef" - season 3 contestant and judge on "Chopped"

Conducting the interview will be Madhu Goel Southworth, Senior Counsel, Legal & Business Affairs, AMC. Producing the show will be Sree Sreenivasan (@sree), digital media professor at Columbia Journalism School and co-founder of SAJA.

LISTEN TO THE RECORDING: http://bit.ly/sajatv2

DESI SPOTTING: Liveblogging the Super Bowl 2010

[Desi Spotting = items with a South Asian connection - see our archive]

Sunday, Feb. 7, 2010: Live-blogging the Super Bowl on this post, looking for South Asian stuff during the telecast - starting 6:45 pm EST. By the way, you can see all the ads, after the game, at CBSsports.com/superbowlads (and see NYT's Stuart Elliot commenting on the commercials here).

• See the 2009 Super Bowl desi live blog here.
• See the 2008 Super Bowl desi live blog here.
• See 2007 post about a single Bud Light ad.

• MEET BRANDON CHILLAR, A SOUTH ASIAN IN THE NFL: Listen to the SAJA webcast from 2010 with Brandon Chillar of the Green Bay Packers, the only South Asian to play in the NFL; his agent, Jim Ivler, his agent; and Kevin Negandhi, ESPN anchor . This year, Chillar and the Packers lost earlier in the playoffs (scroll down at that link, to see a history of South Asians at the Super Bowl).

6:30 pm: When I was a kid, the Super Bowl telecast was a South Asian-free zone. Not anymore...

6:45 pm: JOHN GILL, A SOUTH ASIAN AT THE SUPER BOWL: Turns out John Gill, a player on the reserve squad of the Indianapolis Colts (he may not play), has an Indian father. His full name is John Singh Gill and he told NUsports.com (he's a Northwestern University alum)...

Q: If you could dine with anyone from any period in history, who would it be?
A: Ghandi

[I don't know if the spelling was Gill's fault or NUSports.com's, but it's a common mistake, as we've documented in the past.]

Read the SepiaMutiny coverage of Gill, by Melvin Durai.

ADS: Padma Lakshmi's sexy burger commercial

Not to over-analyze or anything, but after seeing this ad for Hardee's, then watching Paris Hilton's ad for Carl Jr's, I'm thinking that while Padma Lakshmi is easily more attractive, Paris Hilton is actually the superior actress.

ADVERTISING: Israeli Arms Manufacturer Lures India, Or At Least, It Tries

One of Israel's major arms manufacturing companies, Rafael, thought the smartest way to attract the Indians to buy their new weapons system would be to produce a Bollywood style video advertisement. I ran into this video as I was reading the Switchblog:

Defence Professionals, a website that covers international defence community, says in this article that India has been shifting its arms supply from Russia to Israel in recent years.

In 2008, Rafael won a contract worth some $ 340 million to provide 18 Spyder- short-range air defense systems as the Indian Air Force’s low-level quick reaction missile system (LLQRM). The Israeli company is now pushing the Spyder MR (medium-range) variant of the missile, with a range of 35 kilometers, as the Indian Army’s next Medium Range Surface-to-Air Missile (MRSAM) as well as the Spike MANPAD missile system.

According to the Campaign Against Arms Trade, Rafael currently works with several big arms manufacturers like Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman. More here:

Rafael expects orders worth $600m for Gill/Spike from Europe and seems likely to get them as the Netherlands, Finland and Poland ⁹ have already ordered the weapon. Gill/Spike is also operational in Singapore. ¹⁰

Other Rafael exports include the Barak ship-borne anti-missile system to Chile and Singapore,¹¹Popeye missiles to South Korea, ¹²and a co-production agreement with Turkey for Popeye II missiles.¹³

And now India. Wonder if the video sealed the deal.

Please post your thoughts below.

RETAIL: Tanishq jewelry, now at a mall near you

Tanishq, the upscale jewelry group of Titan Industries Ltd. entered US retail with a jewelry boutique in Chicago. And a second is to follow at Garden State Plaza Shopping Center in Paramus, NJ, which is going to be one of 20 stores listed under Fine Jewelry and Watches at the mall. A bit about their business plans, from Smita Aggarwal’s January article in the Indian Express,

To expand its retail presence overseas, Tata's promoted Tanishq, the jewellery business group of Titan Industries, will be coming up with its two stores in United States by 2008-end.

Speaking to The Indian Express on sidelines of a conference, the vice president Retail and Marketing, Jewellery, V Govindraj said, "Tanishq would be opening two jewellery boutiques in US by this year end. These stores will be company owned and are on a pilot basis."

With an interesting product mix, the company will be including a large part of its jewellery design mix, targeted at ethnic Indians. "Clearly, a large part of the product mix will be for ethnic Indians and Non Resident Indians (NRI)," said Govindraj.

These stores will add to its international portfolio since it has a presence in Middle East and far East nations like UAE and Singapore. Most of these stores are in a shop-in-shop format, operating in existing jewellery stores. "The export sales constitute around 6-7 per cent of our total sales," said Govindraj.

From Diamond World, a trade journal August article:

DESI SPOTTING: Deepak Chopra in a Microsoft ad - "I am a human being"

From Benjamin Romano's piece in the Seattle Times about the latest round of ads for Windows:

The 60-second spot, which will see heavy rotation on prime-time network television and on the Web, continues with a series of testimonials by Microsoft employees (including Bill Gates), ordinary people and celebrities in diverse settings around the world who proclaim, "I'm a PC."

Mind-body medicine expert Deepak Chopra intones, "I am a PC and I am a human being. Not a human doing. Not a human thinking. A human being."

The spot closes with the tag line "Windows: Life without Walls," which Microsoft tested globally for a year, said Bill Veghte, senior vice president of Microsoft's online services and Windows business group. It's part of the company's $300 million marketing blitz, including print, Web, television and outdoor advertising.

What do you think? Post your comments below.

ADVERTISING: Hinglish vs. Hindi vs. English in Indian ads

University of Michigan marketing prof Aradhna Krishna is getting press on multiple fronts these days. Last week, US News & World Report reported on a joint study she conducted, comparing the experience of drinking from a stiff cup versus a flimsy cup. The study...

"found that consumers with a high need for touch rated water served in a stiff cup as tastier than the same water served in a flimsy cup. Subjects with a lower need-for-touch didn't let the cup's stiffness influence their opinion of the beverage. The results were detailed earlier this year in the Journal of Consumer Research. Consumers obviously rely on their senses of sight, and sometimes smell or hearing or taste, to determine what products to buy, but research on the role of touch has been sporadic."

Krishna also organized the first Sensory Marketing Conference. We see great wealth in her future.

But for our purposes, what's more interesting is her other study (in the forthcoming Journal of Consumer Research), on advertising to bilingual consumers. From The New York Times:

The researchers asked 122 college students in New Delhi to rate, on a seven-point scale, advertisements for detergent or chocolate, supposedly placed by multinational companies, and written in English, Hindi or a mix of the two.

For chocolate ads, the students preferred English or an English-rich hybrid; for detergent, they preferred a Hindi-rich hybrid.

The moral of the story is that well-off Indian consumers associate English with modern, cosmopolitan lifestyles, but Hindi (or presumably other local languages) has its own uses. More from her paper (pdf):

"Further, unlike the negative associations of inferiority and lower socioeconomic status associated with Spanish for Hispanics in the United States... in India, the Hindi language tends to have several positive associations, such as solidarity, pride, nationalism, family, and belongingness, and is not necessarily associated with lower social status..."

ADS: Let's ID an Apple model, part II

In May 2007, we - and the folks at SepiaMutiny - tried to identify a South Asian model in an Apple store print ad. We failed.

Just now, a friend sent me an e-mail asking: "OMG was that a desi girl?? .....in the new Apple Mac vs PC ad that just ran on NBC??????"

Anyone know? Can you identify her? Post your comments below.

MEDIA WATCH: Vogue India aims for indigent chic

A fashion spread in the latest Vogue India, in which poor, nameless Indians sport $10,000 handbags and $100 bibs, has catalyzed a profound reaction in the press and blogosphere. What is the acceptability, many are asking, of employing such jarring images, un-ironically, for the sake of commerce?

From UK's Telegraph:

"The poor are always used as props, not as real people, which is why they haven't even been named in the magazine," said columnist Parsa Venkateshwar Rao. "Would they use homeless or hard up people in London for this kind of shoot?"

In The New York Times article which first brought widespread attention to the matter, Indian journalist Kanika Gahlaut is quoted:

There’s nothing “fun or funny" about putting a poor person in a mud hut in clothing designed by Alexander McQueen. “There are farmer suicides here, for God’s sake," she said, referring to thousands of Indian farmers who have killed themselves in the last decade because of debt.

To which Vogue India editor Priya Tanna rebuts:

"Lighten up...Vogue is about realizing the 'power of fashion' and the shoot was saying that “fashion is no longer a rich man’s privilege. Anyone can carry it off and make it look beautiful. You have to remember with fashion, you can’t take it that seriously. We weren’t trying to make a political statement or save the world." 

The online debate is mostly propelled by incredulity: