Top 5 Marketing Fails of 2017

1. Zong 4G

A paean to utter banality; generic enough to represent any brand or category (a new brand of fancy eyeliner perhaps?), featuring impossibly beautiful people, dressed unlike any actual Pakistanis would ever do – utterly forgettable.

2. Coke vs chai

Ambitious and embarrassingly clunky. The TVC, with its ‘old lady asks for chai, young people want Coke, but wait!’ trope, is heavy-handed and desperate. There is the glimmer of an insight, but the execution is thin and ultimately cringe-worthy.

3. Tarang

If your kid isn’t sleeping, put on a montage of Tarang ads – guaranteed sedative. It’s essentially the same concept done eleventy times: flashy celebrities, big sets and a banal ‘concept’. One can note the absence of a song and dance this time in favour of ‘conversation’, but in hindsight, I prefer the former because I refuse to believe real people anywhere talk like that.

4. Dove

Ah, a sensitive brand that values ‘real’ women! How can you make such a basic mistake in this ‘woke’ day and age? The morphing of a black woman into a white one doesn’t need any further explanation, so I will let the execution speak for itself.

5. Kendall Jenner – Pepsi

Another instance of a giant brand making a schoolboy error. Let’s depict a teen idol, who is famous for being famous, as the answer to a real national crisis. After all, all you need to do to quell centuries of racist exploitation is a carbonated drink handed out to cops wearing riot gear by a cute girl!

Sara Qureshi is a marketing professional.