This blogger has reached a stage in life where he often turns nostalgic. Ahhh - the good old days ... Sigh ...
Today it was nostalgia in ads. All from about 40 years ago. Colour television had not yet come to India (it came with the Asian Games of 1982). Black & White TVs were few and far between and it was perfectly OK to go to your neighbour's house to watch TV because they had a set and you didn't. Of course, there was only one channel - Doordarshan, the state TV.
Ads were primarily through cinema. Before the movie started, there would be a series of ads shown in full colour. Those days, you eagerly looked forward to the ads as much as you looked forward to the movie itself And then when TV came, these ads morphed to TV, but the largest reach was through cinemas for a long time. Of all the ads, there were 3 or 4 that almost everybody knew by heart. We could hum along, skip along to each of them.
First Gold Spot. When Coca Coal exited India in 1977, a local entrepreneur quickly cashed in with equivalents - Thums Up (Coke), Limca ( a lemon drink) and Gold Spot (Fanta). The Gold Spot ad was a classic - Indians with a taste for Bollywood might recognise a young Javed Jaffrey. Gold Spot, alas, disappeared when Coca Cola reentered India in the late 1990s.
