Business Today Web Exclusive

Anything Black

AC Black is up to its dirty tricks again. What is this wacky young whisky brand up to?

Whisky brands rarely use the testimonial form of advertising. This being South Asia, they would in any case have to go for something more akin to discourse than straight-out testimony. But voodoo-control advertising?

For that, you'd have to turn to Jagatjit Industries' new whisky brand, AC Black. It's brazen enough and nutty enough to do what brands endowed with a greater degree of sobriety wouldn't dare (at least on TV).

The brand first caught attention on its launch last year with its outrageous telekinesis commercial. Remember? The spot with a couple at a bar disrobing one another, swig by swig, by the very luridity of their thoughts (empowered, one would assume, by the whisky's fantasy-fulfilling potency). 'Kuchh bhi ho sakta hai... kuchh bhi' was the slug line, which translates from Hindi loosely to 'Anything can happen... anything'.

The latest TV commercial falls for its own line, and throws a random couple at a party together - read Luke Rhinehart's 'The Dice Man'? --- to have them break into a sorta 'quantum dance'. The voodoo power that's controlling all these dance movements (much to the mystified delight of the two, dressed in black) is revealed to be vested in a couple of AC Black whisky tumblers that get knocked about while being carried on a tray by a waitress into the kitchen. The music picks up as the synchrony heads for its climax --- with the impish waitress placing one tumbler over the other's mouth. 'Kuchh bhi', it ends. Anything. Get it?

It gels perfectly with the brand's 'naughty fun' personality, avers the agency, J&A Communications (that's Joint & Arms, not a take on J&B, which, like Vat 69, is a globally renowned whisky). And it's easy to agree that it's a rather sanitized commercial in its execution, taken shot by shot. Watch it again. It features no whisky bottle, and no glass filled with amber liquid (apple juice, y'see). Not just that, no actual whisky consumption is ever really shown. If the agency is particularly proud, it's for the cunningly roundabout way it has got the brand to convey its heady message - without falling afoul of any of the government's liquor advertising restrictions.

No doubt, the latest AC Black commercial represents some of the wildest thinking in the Indian advertising arena in recent times. The brand has smashed the mould in a category that had grown too accustomed to standardization, and liberated itself, so to speak.

Why, then, isn't AC Black the consensual toast of all ad critics?

Perhaps because the liberation sounds incomplete, a result of its emphatic sexual innuendo; this is part of the stated brand theme, admittedly, and thus hardly objectionable in the context of its overwhelmingly liberal target audience. And yet... and yet.... the ad has even otherwise-unfazed adfolk shuffling about and clearing their throats. This is understandable. Not because these otherwise-unfazed adfolk are greying into soft middle-aged conservatism, but because they set their creative expectations rather high.

The sex, drugs and rock n' roll of the '60s was never to be taken literally as sex, drugs and rock n' roll. So maybe all this commercial needs for unabashed acclaim is a little tweak. Just that little something to evoke a sober dimension of the story. Do you, this moment, feel like resigning yourself to the power of some voodoo doll fantasy?

Issue Contents Write to us Subscription Syndication