Ad Review: 'Google search'

• Ad name: Google Search REUNION
• Brand: Google
• Agency: Ogilvy India
• About: Baldev is an elderly Hindu man in Delhi, India and Yusuf is an elderly Muslim man in Lahore, Pakistan. One day Baldev shows his grand-daughter Suman an old, dated photograph of two children. He tells her that it is himself and his best friend Yusuf when they lived in Lahore prior to the partition of India in 1947. In front of his house there was a park with a gate made in the stone age and each evening he and Yusuf would fly kites there and steal "Jhajhariya" from Yusuf's family sweet shop. After partition, the two friends got separated. Many decades later, Baldev still thinks of Yusuf and misses him. Using details of her grandfather's story, Suman is able to locate Yusuf's sweet shop in Lahore via Google. She connects with his grandson who helps her to plan a surprise visit from Yusuf on Baldev's birthday. 
• Relevance: The ad shows how this magic named Google has become the part and parcel of our lives. For getting information about weather, flight details, addresses, recipes and almost everything, we use Google on laptops, desktops and now on smartphones and portable devices. But this ad depicts, how Google can be used in a greater sense. Connecting two friends, two communities and two countries at large. Not many advertisements leave you with goosebumps! 
• Recollection factor: The length of this ad is long but while viewing it, one does not feel that it is dragging. It touches the emotional chord and almost gives tears at the end when Baldev and Yusuf meet. It shows that still there is a strong and deep connection between the so called 'arch-rivals' INDO-PAK and it depicts the same very sensitively. The ad was released in December and very soon reached over a million views on youtube. Most importantly it was loved by both the Indians and the Pakistanis. It became popular on facebook too and many people shared it. The 'Aman ki Asha' campaign could not achieve such praise whereas Ogilvy India has created a marvel once again and proved their worth. This ad will be remembered by today's 'gadget-freak' generation for a long time. 
• My Rating: full 5 stars for this ad.

My New Year Resolution!

Its a new year, 2014!! Well already a month has passed. The previous year was really good because of many reasons but the most important one was that I stepped into my post-grad life which would be making my career, my profession. The one which I have dreamed of. The one which I have also written everywhere on the social websites. My aspiration of being an advertising professional.

So, one day I asked myself in self-realization, that what extra am I doing to become one of those, besides pursuing an Ad. & P.R. course and doing internships in the agency offices? Knowing that GOOGLE has answers to all our questions, I typed "ADVERTISING INDUSTRY" in the search box. I know that all the important results that GOOGLE gives are on the first page itself. But that day I clicked on the next page as my satisfaction level did not achieve a break-even point from the first page results like 'wikipedia' or some crap slideshows or PDFs which we generally use to copy-paste in our project assignments. Something unusual happened and I got my answer from the second page. 'Ad critique' was written in one of the results and a link to a blog was given. On opening it, I found that the last blog that person has written was 5 years back in 2009 and he was not an Indian that I could find from the peregrine ads which he had reviewed in his blog. 

Thanks to that blog, I got my answer. Someone would reckon it as cheating but no! I just got the idea of making an 'Indian remake' of that blog. Haha! Jokes apart,  I got an idea that I should lessen reviewing movies and increase reviewing advertisements. This would, in turn, help me in building my portfolio. So one can call this as my new year resolution but yes I will be reviewing different ads now on my blog.

I got my answer from GOOGLE. Thus my first ad review will be of GOOGLE as well. Coming soon... :)