Monthly Archives: January 2007

analysis / cricket — 1 Comment
26
Jan 07

Tasteless Ads on Neo Sports Can Send Wrong Message

Neo Sports is a new TV channel in India. Their tag-line is “Home of Cricket in Indian Television”. They are carrying the ongoing India-West Indies cricket series being played in India. I am not writing this post, not about their cricket coverage. But about some in-house ads they are running with the tag-line “It’s tough to be a West Indian in India”. To many such ads can be considered racial and provocative.

In one of the ads, they show a West Indian guy going to a dhaba where he is fed a dish red with chillies. He is crying for water after the first bite of this red curry. No one in the dhaba let him have water. One gentleman in the dhaba pokes his finder into a glass of water so that the West indian guy cannot drink, finally he goes to the hand-wash. Here another gentlemen just cuts off he water supply. The ad end with the pathetic tag-line “It’s tough to be a West Indian in India“. Sick ad.

Then there is another ad. A West Indian couple goes on a romantic boat ride on a large lake. Here their Indian boatman takes them to the middle of the lake throws his oars into the water. Then he jumps into the water swimming back to the shore. Leaving a visibily terrifed West Indian couple stranded in the middle of the lake on a small boat with no oar-man and no oars. This ad also ends with the sick tag line “It’s tough to be a West Indian in India”

Indian tradition says “atithi deva bhabo” (a guest is like god). If these ads are a measure of how a guest is treated in India, then who will visit India. These ads do not project the real picture, but just creativity gone wrong.

Does Neo Sports realize that in 2 months, the Indian cricket team will be in West Indies to play the Cricket Work Cup ? So, will the West Indians or anyone else send such tasteless messages to the Indian team when they go to play cricket series abroad.

I am unable to see any humor in this ads. I think these will send a very wrong message to our West Indian guests. Neo Sports channel can help by show more maturity. Is anyone listening ?

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analysis — No Comments
26
Jan 07

ICICI Bank : Anti-Phising ads on National TV

In recent times phishing (read scam) on the internet in increasingly becoming a nasty threat. The term phising generally refers to a kind of internet fraud where an unsupecting person receives an apparently genuine looking email, which has been carefully forged to look almost like an genuine email. Typically, such emails would cite some genuine looking information and ask unsuspecting people to reply back with passwords or pin numbers. In some cases, these emails would provide links to phishing website, that impersonated the real website. If a user clicks on such links and tried to log into the forged website, his/her password would get logged and misused by the phisher(the person or the group responsible for the scam).
Know more about phishing here and here.

ICICI Bank is one of the largest banks in India. Recently it has started a Television campaign on national TV to make people aware of threats of phishing. It is really appreciable effort on the part of the ICICI Bank to launch this effort. In general most people are not aware of what phishing is all about and can easily fall prey to internet scamsters. Like most banks ICICI has a web page education customers on internet frauds and phishing (Link to the page) .
The internet scamsters are always finding innovative ways to dupe normal people who use the internet. Along with awareness of the internet threats, using a good set of tools while using internet could help :

  1. Use email service or email clients that support anti-spam.Email services like Yahoo mail and Gmail have effective anti-spam tools. Email clients like Mozilla Thunderbird, Apple Mail have very good anti-spam filters built into it.
  2. Use web browser that warns when a the user for some reason ends up in a suspected phishing site. Mozilla Firefox 2.0, Microsoft Internet Explorer 7 and Opera 9 supports built in anti-phishing protection.
  3. Third party tools like MacAfee Site Advisor can also be very helpful on protecting the end user against phishing and other internet spam. Site Advisor works with both Internet Explorer and Firefox.

ICICI Bank is right on with their campaign against the internet threats like phising. Their nationalally televised ads against phishing will go a long way to make the average internet user aware of threats of internet scams and help safer internet experience. Keep up the good work ICICI Bank.

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