Beware the Meme

The fundamental difference between economics and marketing is that while economics assumes that all individuals are rational, marketing assumes that all individuals are stupid. This explains 90% of the advertising that you see today. This is quite acceptable, given that 90% of movies, TV shows, music and most other forms of popular entertainment today are not much better. But what’s more dangerous is the sort of thing that Coca-Cola has been trying to achieve with its new “Brrrrr” ad campaign. As an ordinary lay person, you might wonder how an ad campaign that makes no sense and sounds like an overworked electric motor could possibly be dangerous for you. After all, as an ordinary lay person, I would’ve wondered the same.

However, as a person with some level of exposure to how advertising agencies work, I can guess, with a reasonable degree of accuracy, what the jhola-clad ad agency fellows had in mind when pitching this whole idea of “Brrrrr” to the business suit-clad marketing fellows at Coca Cola. “Brrrr” was not just another nonsensical ad campaign that would take the cola wars to a new level of inanity. “Brrrr” would’ve been pitched as a “meme”. According to the official definition, a meme is a unit of social information for carrying cultural ideas, symbols, or practices, which can be transmitted from one mind to another through writing, speech, gestures, rituals, or other imitable phenomena. In English, this means that a meme is a fad.

In advertising, this means a lot of money. I can imagine how the ad agency chaps would’ve gone on for two hours, explaining over a dozen slides the phenomena of ‘memes’. They would’ve quoted Richard Dawkins (the British biologist who coined the term) to sound intelligent and highbrow, and quoted their five-year old offspring’s latest school fad to sound “street” and “with it”. They would’ve droned about phenomena like the rituals accompanying tequila shots and the latest email forward to emphasize the power of memes. And then they would’ve landed the killer blow about how the emergence of social networks and new media has meant that memes, when exploited well, can just take off on their own and all the company would need to do would be to sit back, laugh maniacally and watch as the world went mad and purchased Coca Cola everywhere.

“Brrrr” would, therefore, not be another in a series of forgotten ad campaigns. Instead, “Brrrr” would take the shape of a social movement, a fad that is picked up by ‘new media’ and regurgitated endlessly until everyone from upscale Manhattan bars to roadside Dar es Salaam stalls are shaking their bodies in odd ways for no apparent reason. “Brrrr” would be tweeted and re-tweeted countless times on twitter; “Brrrr” would be the new Facebook phenomena that would cause uproar in the social networking world; “Brrrr” would be played by DJs at nightclubs to get the crowd at its feet; “Brrrr” would receive 200,000 hits a day on YouTube and you would be praying for the day when space travel is economical enough to help you get the hell away from all this.

Now, a lot of you might think that I’m making this sound far more sinister than it actually is; that I’ve painted a greatly exaggerated picture; that ad agency mandarins cannot possibly be THAT diabolical and that the crisis would never take on such drastic proportions. Well, I have one word for you - Macarena! I still shudder/wake up in a cold sweat/feel a shiver down my spine/pray for economical space travel when I think of the days when you couldn’t switch on the TV or the radio without listening to the Macarena, when you couldn’t go to a party without being subjected to those ludicrous dance steps that looked like everyone was touching various body parts to check if anything was missing. And this was before the era of social networking and new media, so you can imagine how apocalyptic things can get now.

The good news though is that Coca Cola seems to have wholeheartedly bought the idea and decided to sink millions into ensuring its success. This usually means that it will not succeed. While fads may be stupid, annoying and give you genocidal thoughts, the one good thing about them is that they cannot be controlled. Despite a lot of people spending years researching the phenomena of fads and countless books being written about fads and how you can cash in on them, the truth is that you cannot. Fads are still gloriously unpredictable and the harder you try to control them, the less likely you are to succeed.

And right now Coca Cola, to my great relief, is trying desperately hard to make this whole “Brrrr” thing succeed. Whenever I switch on the TV, every second ad seems to be “Brrrr”. When I browse the net or log on to Facebook, a Coca Cola ad/pop-up asks me to post my “Brrrr” video and share it with the world. While it’s annoying temporarily, I can put up with it safe in the knowledge that it wouldn’t really take off beyond the world of advertising; that people wouldn’t forward me links to their “Brrrr” videos, set “Brrrr” as their status update or start dancing to “Brrrr” at parties. In fact, if I were to be all Navjot Singh Sidhu over this whole affair, what I’d say is “My dear friend, you might need a tank of gasoline to set a cottage on fire, but all it takes to start a forest fire is a matchstick! So how could Coca Cola succeed when they’ve used up an entire offshore oil rig?”

Death of a Villain

While this isn’t a very nice thing to say, sad news is something that one comes across daily in the newspapers. Some of it, like the Japan earthquake, you react to and think about – while others, like the release of a new Lady Gaga album, you tend to file away under the ‘indifferent’ section of your mind. So a few days ago when I read that Bollywood actor Bob Christo had passed away, I didn’t cast the headline a second glance and had begun the mental process of filing it away…until my eyes fell upon the accompanying picture:

And immediately, it set off some sort of alarm bell in my head. This was the face of pure Bollywood evil! Granted, we’ve had far greater and more legendary villains like Amrish Puri, Danny and Amjad Khan – but if I were to think of one villain that evoked pure, unadulterated hatred the second you saw him on screen, it was Bob. And I didn’t even know that it was Bob, as the first time I heard his name was when I read about his death!

I speak with very limited experience, of course. Apparently Bob has done over 200 films in Bollywood, of which I would’ve seen less than a dozen. But the point is, he’s always been one of those “as evil as can possibly be” kind of villains, without any shade of grey. Ever! Granted, Bollywood villains were anyway usually pure evil – but once in a while there could be mitigating circumstances as to why the villain was evil – he could be a victim of circumstances. Or the villain would be ‘humanized’ in some way by having a brother or wife or kid. Or he would have a cat that he genuinely felt affection for. Or even the odd movie where the villain would turn nice/see the evil of his ways.

But with Bob Christo, it seemed that he was out and out evil, and his character would never be fleshed out in any way that could possibly evoke sympathy from the viewer. Unlike other villains, Bob was never allowed to portray a character – he was pure evil the second he appeared on screen, and stayed that way until he got brutally killed. He would rape, kill, smuggle, do drugs, loot, plunder, castrate, set on fire, torture – often in the same film. And that was all he did. For example, if Manoj Bajpai was to play an evil, corrupt cop, they’d still show him going back home to his wife and kid; or how he ended up turning evil due to the system being corrupt or a family member dying of an expensive, critical illness. But if Bob Christo was shown as an evil cop, he’d only be shown in scenes where he brutally tortures the hero – they won’t show him going back home to a family or even a pet. Hell, even if they showed him doing something nonchalant like smoking, it would probably be accompanied with evil background music and wicked glint in the eye / with lots of alcohol around to connote decadent lifestyle / mujraa-type dance happening to denote complete lack of morals. The movie would not have a single scene depicting Bob doing something humane – I’m not talking about something saintly like rescuing an injured kitten from the traffic and bandaging its paws, but even something mundane like giving his kid some pocket money.

All this recollection of Bob and the sort of movies he was in (a lot of the smuggling-type ones, I think) did make me realize one thing, though – villains today just don’t inspire that sort of terror anymore. This is not specific to Bob – just think of the villains from the 70s and 80s Bollywood movies. The evil ‘thakur’ who would ruthlessly oppress the simple villagers, the demonic ‘daaku’ that would wantonly terrorize simple villagers just for the fun of it, or the devious smuggler that would ruin countless lives (and the nation’s economy) with his misdeeds. The sort of roles essayed by the likes of Danny, Amrish Puri and Amjad Khan with such conviction that I’ve come across a few people who actually believe they’re evil in real life! Even well into the 90s, Bollywood was churning out movies where Amrish Puri would still be a thakur/zamindar, with his henchmen merrily chopping to pieces any villager that had the temerity to disobey his orders.

Compare this with the villains of today’s Bollywood movies. Half the movies don’t even have a villain, and even if they do, he’d be a watered-down ‘anti-hero’ or a ‘negative role with shades of grey’. He would probably be coordinating a kidnapping or serial blasts over his cell phone while being out shopping with his wife – something that Bob would’ve completely frowned upon. While I do believe that this subtlety has helped improve the overall standard of Bollywood films with lots of experimental films seeing the light of day and the emergence of character actors, I think that as a kid, I would’ve preferred the sort of rubbish movies that Bob was part of. The subtle stuff of today would have seemed slow and boring – and there’d be no fun without characters like Gabbar and Mogambo, who are part of cinematic folklore today.

Bob’s death reminded me of a simpler time when heroes were good, villains were bad and there was nothing in between.