The Perfect Ad

Early in my advertising career, some Ad Big Wig came n gave us a few smart sassy snippets of slurp-up advice, that we, on command, slurped up.

What sells most in ads, said he : Sex, Kids, Dogs

Eager to attain immediate Big Wigdom, I immediately thought up scenarios combining all 3 for my next ad film. But they were all a li’l revolting – in any permutation together – especially since the product to be advertised was a stress-relief tablet.

But I finally crunched all together in a brilliant script - with a cute baby n her sexy mom, playing with a cute puppy.

Ad film Shoot day : The models were shortlisted, the young mom short-skirted, the baby was drool-worthily cute, all dimples and gurgles and giggles. The puppy cuddly.

The day of the shoot, cameras ready, lights set up, the baby wants to grab the camera. The crew, the client, the ad team all try to distract her. She starts to howl. No more giggles, just growls !

She is hungry, said her mom, so she was given Cerelac. She didn’t want it. She tried to chew on the light cable. Everyone got into the act again to stop her. She begins to howl again.

She is sleepy, says her mom. So the baby, the main star of my aborting ad filim goes to sleep. She sleeps all through the morning. We wake her after 4 hours, and she begins to howl. We give her a cable to chew on, and she smiles.

The Director starts shooting, and the baby starts howling.

She wants to go to the toilet, says her mom, so we spend most of the afternoon, changing diapers, and cleaning her up. The baby begins to howl. She has diaper rash, says the mom. She will be ready in a minute. Then the baby goes back to sleep for another 4 hours.

She wakes up at dusk, and the Director begins to howl. He’s lost the light. He can’t shoot. The baby starts to howl because the Director is howling. I have to shoot the rest of the film with another substitute baby without dimples – he is a 2 year old toddler. The stress relief tablet never explains how the curly haired dimpled girl baby turns later into a straight-haired bigger boy. The puppy never makes his film debut at all.


Learning : I never know whether my sexy mom-baby-puppy ad film actually sold the stress-relief tablet to the public. But the entire crew, ad team and client team and everyone else on the sets were popping up the stress-relief tablets. In between howling.