Indian traffic, a metaphor for today’s ad biz
| April 13th, 2009The most impressive thing about vehicular traffic in India is what it sounds like:
Every car, tuk-tuk, truck, bus or scooter – honking once every few seconds. A collective cacophony of horns rising from a buzzing swarm, each one, a feeble attempt from a vehicle to make his presence, location and track known to every other vehicle.
Of course the result is not so effective. Plenty of cars have plenty of dents. I personally, have been involved in two bashings and I don’t even come to India that often.
And it’s not just the professional drivers who do it. I’ve been driven by people who in the normal course of life and business can be considered to be quite sane, pleasant and normal. And if you ask why do you honk your horn every three seconds they reply: “I don’t know.”
And there, ladies and gentlemen, lies the most powerful metaphor of what is going on in today’s media landscape. Hundreds of thousands of brands, all crawling over the marketplace, each one honking its little horn in an effort to make itself known. Each one, contributing to the drone that is so unpleasant that it literally forces people to try and block their senses by taking such actions as investing in personal video recorders.
And if you really probe and analyse their strategies you’ll see the answer to why they honk is “I don’t know why.”
If you are not doing something that makes you sound different to everybody else, you are just contributing to the noise. And you run the risk of being run over.
that’s mayhem. and slightly depressing.