Friday, December 08, 2006

The peddling Bollywood celebrities


It is astonishing to see how Bollywood celebrities peddle anything and everything! Celebrity faces adorn every hoarding, wall, screen, gadget that there is to adorn. If you go to an appliance store, you can easily identify every LG appliance that there is in the store, cause all of them have a big huge face of Abhishek Bachchan's on them. When you are at an appliance store, it is real funny to have Abhishek Bachchan stare at you from all corners.

Amitabh endorses a huge range of products - Pepsi, Emami, Dabur, Parker pens, Reid and Taylor, Eveready batteries, Cadbury's etc. He is truly the Lord of Endorsements. Shahrukh Khan can easily be called the Ad Khan. He endorses Pepsi, Hyundai, Airtel, Videocon, Sun Feast, Tag Heur, Emami, Mayur Suitings, Lux(!), ICICI and more.

Hoardings with stars and their products can be spotted through out the city. You have the Bachchans, Khans, Aishwarya Rais, Kareena Kapoors staring at you from everywhere. All of this is really good for the product brand name, but not so much for the celebrity brand name, IMHO. After all, the "stars" just become peddlers at the end of the day. Such an overkill.

In contrast, you hardly ever see Hollywood stars promoting products in the US. They do promote goods in other countries for very hefty amounts, but at least you are not seeing them endorsing goods in the US. The paparazzi cover them enough and the stars appear on enough and more TV talk shows to promote their movies/books/agenda. If they were to endorse goods as well, it would have been a bit much.

What prompted me to write this post was seeing this new Shahrukh Khan's Videocon ad.
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Seriously, what is he doing in this ad? :-O