barriers break when...

November, 2007

Dear MD (Airtel),

We are a small ad agency in London and one of our creative directors accidentally downloaded a video of two kids playing football in Afghanistan. Since there is a football in the footage and both kids are wearing some sort of footgear, we pitched very hard to both Nike and Adidas but were shown the door on the grounds that neither of the kids resemble Ronaldinho and hence could not be shown growing up to a Ronaldinho in the course of the ad.

I asked my team to scout for irrelevant ad-making firms in India and you will be delighted to know that Airtel was the first name that came up.

I have seen all your ads and I have to say that the only jarring aspect of the ad is its subtlety, ironically. What I'm trying to say is that I still had no idea what the product was after watching those ads. I did some research online to find out, though and am now familiar with your offering.

We can quickly convert this raw footage into an Airtel ad by adding your background score. We downloaded this tune from Kabul prison archives where we figured this would be used, along with Eminem's latest, to torture prisoners through repeated listening. It is quite pleasant at first hearing, I must add.

In compliance with your censorship guidelines, we have deleted the graphic footage of what happens to the kids when the border guard finds out. Also the cellphone scenes have been deleted so as to not dilute the brand message.

I spoke to your Marketing Head with this idea and listened to an earful from him about my audacity and about how I should run my business. We are a small firm and we cannot afford to antagonise a firm as big as yours. I think it's important that you intervene and we discuss this face to face, because as they say, careers shake when people balk!

Yours
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