Sometimes I see an ad and no matter how dismissive and non judgemental I want to be, it becomes impossible to stop thinking about it. And these highly bothersome thoughts were a gentle reminder that I had created this not so gentle blog for this very purpose.
Have you seen the latest Pepperfry ads? The ones with the young woman moving to Mumbai, the super respectful son not letting his mother suffer the trauma of second hand furniture and this super enthusiastic couple deciding their furniture where the wife is so needlessly mean to the poor husband it just makes you wonder if the scriptwriter was sending a message to the whole bandwagon of sexist ads portraying women badly. Anyway, can't risk getting caught among the feminist brigade for making snide remarks, so moving on.
The ads are nice. Engaging. As a viewer, I interacted well with the ads. That said, one of them left me flabbergasted the first time I watched it; it was the young woman moving to Mumbai piece, her father throws light on situations where she'd need a man to help her out with moving furniture and fixing things and her comi-frustrated (made that up just now) response is "I'll totally marry a carpenter" followed by a chuckle that's meant to make the viewer chuckle too, but alas, I certainly didn't. Why I think Pepperfry got this wrong? At the end of the day carpenters are probably working their backs off to make all that lovely furniture that makes this brand what it is!
Sure, you have fancy terms like furniture 'designers' and 'artisan' and 'interior stylists' to describe someone who makes a piece of furniture, but I found it unfair that the ad portrayed carpenters as men who a young, working woman in an urban city would normally not marry unless she needed someone to lift and move her things around. Is it because they're assumed to be from the labour class? Maybe it's just me, but it made me think a lot about our perceptions of people who are manual labourers. Aren't carpenters on some level engineers? Aren't they artisans too in their own line of work? I wonder what English speaking 'carpenters' who watched the ad must feel.
The irony is what bothered me - a furniture company making light of an industry that it in some way relies upon. I think they could have done better. Actually they could have done without that ad.
The irony is what bothered me - a furniture company making light of an industry that it in some way relies upon. I think they could have done better. Actually they could have done without that ad.
Here's the ad if you've not caught it on tele. Thoughts?
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