Fake IPL Player, Real Conversations

Spent the last 30 minutes browsing through the Fake IPL Player's blog. It's incriminating, it's salacious, it's bawdy gossip at it's best/ worst!

Now whether it's a (a)real fake guy, or (b)a marketing ploy(I hope) or (c)an actual player blogger(rarefied chance), this guy/team knows how to create smutty buzz and generate conversation! Aren't you amazed at his site traffic and the thousands of comments from visitors and followers!

For quite some time, I have been arguing the case for conversation as brand content. But it mostly goes over the head of body-copy-only guys. Well the fake IPL player comes to my rescue.

Here are a few random thoughts which are floating in my little sleepy mind post lunch...

1. Context is Everything. The fake IPL player's blog gives a lot of inspiration to creating engaging alternatives to vapid 'Hilaa Denge', 'Dhikha Denge', 'Bataa Denge' ads on TV. He/she shows how gossip, locker room talk, the management vs. the player jibes can be engaging content as well. Maybe brands like Sprite, Levis, Axe can do more niche social media stuff which can draw lessons from this guy!

2. Don't Control the Conversation.Most Indian brands try to control/ avoid the conversation in the blogosphere/ social media and read too much into the controlled conversation(read FGD). This guy's posts have a thousand plus comments!! Comments by readers, visitors are part of the conversation. They add flavour/ spice to the conversation(even though here it degenerates into uncontrolled bitching:-)

Maybe brands like Mentos, Sprite(again), some of the bike brands(Pulsar for instance) could encourage a more intimate conversation with their niche audiences instead of merely pummeling the great looking, expensive ads. (Okay, I love the Tarsem(?) made Pulsar ad, but after the 13th viewing I now reach out for the remote/ or better still close my eyes. Instead guide me to the making of the ad web-site or the making of the bike(to the more engineering inclined DTSi variety)

3. Celebrity is One Of usWe knew(for some time now)that celebrities are not always on a pedestal. They lost some of their halo when they signed their 10th brand contract:-) But didn't know really that he/she is merely one of us.

The celeb can be reviled(SRK is called Badshah Dildo on this guy's blog- now how worse can it get from here). In contrast,the big brands largely treat celebs in an anachronistically sugar-coated way replete with a fake smile, fake swagger and fake talk!!

And the funny thing I feel is that all this bad talk and gossip from blogs like these won't really harm the celebs. But they will just make the Dish TV, Hyundai and sundry other badly made fake-talk-fake-smile ads even more boring for some of us!!

Celeb bashing might be more interesting than celeb grovelling!!

Well hats off to the fake IPL player and his blog!. You are giving us all real-time lessons in generating conversation(even though it's smutty). We need more brave brands and a mutant strain of journo-copy-writer-gossip-columnist to perfect this art for Indian brands.

Vinod Mehta Ko Gussa Kyun Aata Hai

Just read a good speech by Vinod Mehta(editor-in-chief, Outlook group of publications) on afaqs. Since it's getting harder and harder these days to read/ view good content in the Indian media-sphere, any good content must be re-purposed and circulated:-) May the tribes of men/ women like Mehta increase...

You can read the full article on agencyfaqs here...

Snack bytes
1. He touched upon the media’s myopia regarding how its credibility is being eroded. To the extent that journalism today is often confused with being part of the entertainment industry.

2. Once you treat the media as if it is no different from running an ice-cream parlour, journalism loses out to commerce.

3. As journalists we need to remember that a newspaper’s credibility is like the virginity of a woman. You can lose it only once.

4. "I say this with much humility, but brand managers, with honourable exceptions, are congenitally incapable of understanding the nature and purpose of journalism. They simply cannot understand it by virtue of their background: which is sales in order to maximise profits. They can never understand that content is more, much more, than what readers want. It also has a social dimension. Thus, content is a mix of what the reader wants and what he does not want. The trick is to marry the two and make money."

5. Ladies and gentlemen, in my nearly 30 years as editor, I have heard a lot of nonsense talked about journalism and its role in India, but this piece of nonsense - 'The reader is King and give him what he demands' - is outrageously and self-evidently absurd and dangerous.

To demolish it is urgent. To let it become the benchmark of our profession is to put in peril everything we have worked for in 60 years.

6. We must lead readers, not be led by them. Really great journalism must do more than merely give people what they want. There has to be room for the unexpected, for stories the public has no idea it wants until it sees them.

What Mr. Mehta rants about is not a phenomena restricted to print or TV media. This senseless and gut-less pandering to 'this is what the consumer wants' ails advertising as well. Read a related post here...