Tag: Advertising

12 shots from an AK47. At point blank. And the CEO survives? How?

Year 2014, Texas, USA.

Trent Kimball, is the CEO of Texas Armoring Corporation (TAC).

He released a video that shows him being shot by one of his employees using an AK-47 while he sat inside a Mercedes-Benz SUV.

The exercise is to prove that the company’s bulletproof cars work.

The CEO comes out safe absolutely unscathed. He looks cool and speaks to the camera saying; “Life is precious, protect it”.

The sharpshooter fires 12 shots at Kimball and the CEO just sits in the driver’s seat. Unharmed.

There were cameras both inside and outside the vehicle to cover the show.

Kimball is what a company CEO should be. He put his life behind a promising product. A Merc Protects!

How many CEOs have we seen who were ready to give their lives in order to sell a product? 

 

When did ‘Whats Up?’ become a WhatsApp since?

How has technology changed your job?

When we studied Mass Communication and Journalism in the late 80s, many of us wanted to work in print, on the radio or assist cinema directors.

The copywriter’s job didn’t pay very much. They gave us copies to write about ₹200 ($2) worth of di-pole television antennas. Disgusting!

Television hit India big in the mid 90s. A lot of us could find jobs in the news and entertainment television. The job paid us well.

We were just about halfway through mastering the analogue format of broadcasting and the digital world hit us blind.

4:3 (aspect ratio) gave way to 16:9. All in a blink. Star Group’s Channel V was a rage among the younger music-loving audience. People watched MTV-grind till late at home.

Tapes were gone and we carried large disks. Digitization was a jiffy. Edit at a low resolution and make the master copy in high-res. Multi-layering helped insert cut-away shots quickly. Broadcasting soon became 24/7.

Social media came like a deluge. That hit us big. We were threatened with job losses at Y2K. We sat clueless many times.

Machines have become smaller and one machine (Fire, Flint and Finalcut Pros) did it all. From scripting, sequencing, digitizing, editing, keying, GFX, sound-mixing, titles and mastering. All from the word GO!

The cameras have a lot of pixels to offer. Technicians shot many episodes on a given day.

Citizens journalism is the new kid in town. Thanks to an explosion called YouTube.

The tool for shooting a film sequence is now just a phone. A smartphone is your pocket broadcaster. All credit to technology. 

Amateurish pan-shots. Bad cuts. Jump videos. Poor quality soundbites. No ‘rule of third’ in the composition. Long boring stories. Unethical content. No age-appropriate certificate.

And the greater casualty is the watershed at 9pm was gone. Anyone can watch anything, anytime.

YouTube has become the broadcaster’s market for cheap goods. Made in China.

The ‘cheaper a dozen’ market now has around 2.6 billion (about 250 crore) active users per month.

More than 114 million (about 12 crore) active channels.

People upload 2,500 new videos every minute and more than 150,000 videos are available on your phone every hour. There’s no stopping a video on YouTube.

The last time we heard about an assembly line of a product was when Henry Ford made cars.

Such is the scale of spoil in the mind of an avid video-watching kid.

Ryan Kaji is a nine-year-old boy from Texas. He has over 29 million subscribers on his YouTube channel, Ryan’s World. In 2020, Kaji earned nearly $30 (about ₹3 crores) million from his channel. All he does is review toys for kids.

We lost the race a long time ago, thanks to the arrival of technology. IMHO!

PS: Today I could sit and ask an AI (ChatGPT) to write a brief about how technology affected an editor’s or a news producer’s job in the television industry. But, why?

This is the only time I could give the AI some rest and do a job that’s genuinely mine. So I’ve chosen to write one myself.

Thanks for reading.