….. and to my left, Maestro Ezzat on the guitar

Last night, I chanced upon this link (click here) on a third party orkut scrap and till that time i hadn’t heard about the brand Carmex Lip Balm. Between now and then .. i have indirectly told over 20 people about it. Multiply that by another 20 and in 40 hours you have informed atleast 400 people about Carmex.

0 to 400 in 40 hours ain’t no bad deal … thats Absolute Viral Marketing folks! :)

Here is a little more for the road www.carma-labs.com

Here is a little something that i’ve been a little busy with lately. Too many late nights and weekends but good fun! Click on the thumbnails to see them upclose and personal :)

92FM Dubai Campaign

101.6 CITY FM Campaign

Hit96.7FM Campaign

Special Thanks to Yasmine (Account Manager) for being patient and proactive , Hywell Waters (Photographer) for playing along and being a sport, Sakib Afridi ( Associate Creative Director ) for letting me fly free.

ok .. so am on a ranting spree.. wtf are you going to do about it ? :P

see, i just had a startling realisation .. actually two to be precise.
1• the world is just full of people who think that their job isn’t done until and unless thay have an opinion.
To illustrate my theory better, here is an example – take a perfectly designed ad and put three suits in front of it (Suits is a term popularly used to refer to client service personel in an advertising agency. Most of them resemble the likes of bugs bunny pretending to be Mr. Smith from Matrix – sophisticatedly annoying). The ad has been finessed and loved and masturbated upon by everyone in the agency, but in the wee hours before the presentation, a very dutiful suit always has to point out the possibility of perhaps moving the headline 2.24 cm up and making the shade of blue closer to the color of his grandmothers porch. Does he not realize that the ad already looks lie it has OD’d on some potent garbage fumes already ??? and that changing color won’t make it any more marketable than it is. Bah!!!

2• There isn’t too much difference between ears and arse! All you have to do really is move the letter ‘e’. Afterall, we all kinda get used to hearing so much shit from everybody everyday that it really doesnt matter if your ears and arse have an organ exchange programme afterall.

And whilst i am still ranting about the idiots around me. Here is a person who has made ranting into the most beautiful piece i have ever heard – Ani Difranco and her piece ‘self evident’. Although melo, these have got to be my one of many favorite lines from the track.

“yes, us people are just poems, we’re 90% metaphor with a leanness of meaning approaching hyper-distillation …….we are 10% literal, 90% metaphor, 3000 some poems disguised as people”

Don’t think i’ve ever said this out loud but this lovely city of mine – Dubai .. is seriously suffering from a condition called the ‘mefirst syndrome’. I mean the obsession to do everything bigger and better was one thing but now comes this strange (almost juvenile) attitude of ‘me first’.

Take a load of this – client wants to run an ad in the paper 2 months before his ‘proposed service’ has come into effect because he has allegedly heard through the grapewine that a competitor may be offering the same services ‘soon’. So Mr. Paranoia without any idea of when competition may take affect decides that the only way he can have an edge is to release overnight sloppy ads to say ‘ ME FIRST! ‘

BBah!!!! and in case you haven’t realized why i’m ranting in the first place – it’s because it is now 12:55am and i am still in the office trying to finish this lame excuse of an ad and i am hungry and desperately want to go home.

On that note.. i’ll leave y’all with a shanty from my ol pal Crooner Buble – Home

Godspeed.

The annual advertising tradition calls for cubs (creatives under the age of 28) to be set loose from their den away from the papa and mama creatives and asked to go and fight it out head to head against other ferocious cubs in a battle called the ‘Young Lions Creative Competition’.

This year, it was my turn along with four others from the TBWA den. The topic for this year was ‘ROAD SAFETY’ (predictable and typical yet a toughy)

6 Hours, 25 scribbles, 3 potential good ideas and numerous bad ideas later, Melvin & Raj on table#12 had this to offer.

Body Copy reads: Speeding is murder with a license. Slow Down