The talking Volkswagen ad in yesterday's TOI was a fabulous start to my day.

It made me feel positive, revitalised, hopeful and happy. It was the perfect stress buster. The things you can do with the mortar and pestle in your kitchen, even when you're not cooking.

Maybe the next time the ad agency could create bigger ripples by having the newspaper delivered by someone from the creative team that came up with the idea.

Yes, the things I can do with my kitchen mortar and pestle...

I mean seriously, does Volkswagen even know its target audience in India? Do they think that someone who can afford to buy one of their cars is going to listen to some ugly, tacky, Made-in-China type of talking box clumsily stuck to the back page of their morning newspaper? Or were they reaching out only to blind people, who can't read the copy in the ad and more importantly, can't drive a car...

To make things worse, this morning's paper had an article about how it was the first ad of its kind in the world! Come on, is that really something to be proud of? I can't understand how the idea even went past the agency's internal filters before actually reaching the client and getting approved! The ad is everything that is wrong with the industry in India.

I have always believed that advertising is not a job for creative people. It is a job for marketing people who can also think creatively. You can have baboons blowing bubblegum out of their assholes but if it's not going to communicate what the product/service means and not going to make me want to go out and buy it, then you've done nothing but waste a whole lot of time and money (both the clients' and the consumers, after all who pays for it in the end?).

Unfortunately, in India, most people in advertising are aspiring writers and directors of vague, dark, brooding movies that no one understands including themselves. Just as long as the film looks "brilliant man!"

So they spend their lives feeling frustrated in jobs where the pressure is too high and they are expected to be creative on demand. The client snaps a finger and you have to shit out ten brilliant concepts. Most of them have no connect with the masses, and don't even use the products that they help sell. Many are not even familiar with the local language and culture and unleash their own preconcieved notions on to the unsuspecting public. You have Bengalis trying to sell cola to Tamilians and Tamilians trying to sell fairness creams to Maharashtrians.

And whether anyone likes to admit it or not, in the end all they care about is the awards. The most ridiculous thing is is that all the competitions judge ads on the basis of their creative concepts and executions and "effective" advertising is just one small category. For crying out loud, shouldn't it be the other way round. An ad can only be considered good if it is effective. Get real about the medium people, what are you making these fabulous creatives for? It's just as stupid as someone defending a bad film by saying "but the story was good..." Then why the hell use a visual medium, and that too badly, to tell the story? If all I want is a good story, I might as well stay at home and read it in a book.

So there you have it - a bunch of confused folks, who are actually very nice individually, all hanging out at posh places, subscribing to foreign magazines, watching movies with sub-titles and holidaying in the one place I want to ban all of them from entering. These are the kind of people trying to sell detergent and toothpaste to the entire country.

P.S. These are also the kind of people who are going to stone me ;-)