In this video, you can see a pretty amazing light show projected on the old Parliament Building, opposite Galle Face Green. It only emerges at the end that this is a birthday greeting to President Mahinda Rajapaksa, besides that it’s quite lovely and abstract. By Shift Solutions. You can see more of their work on Vimeo.

Sri Lanka’s Internet is quite slow by regional standards. We do, however, have wide coverage and it feels cheap. That is, I have a lot of friends online, but they all complain about how slow it is. That’s better than not being online at all, but it still sucks. These graphs are from LIRNEasia’s yearly South Asian Quality Of Service review (direct PDF). Some of the data is from another LIRNEasia report by Helani Galpaya.

I was in university when Axe body spray came out. I think they gave it away at some party. We kept it on a table and sprayed it to annoy each other. I always thought it smelled like ass. I just read an interesting article about their marketing strategy, which seems to be a bit more sophisticated than sex sells. It may, however, have oversold itself.

I’m not going to say that much. Please watch the video and scroll down for my comments. It’s awesome. The model is Rick Genest. It’s a very simple ad with a lot of work in front of the camera, and a lot of story behind that.

Indian ads can be great, but they are insanely repetitive. On Star World, for example, they’ll show the same ad twice in the same commercial break and sometimes seven or eight times during a show. That gets old really fast. Whether the ad is good or bad, it actually sours me on the brand. So, here’s a thought. If you’re buying that much space, why not introduce slight variations in the ads?

I like Indian ads. I just wish they would make more than seven of them at a time. The latest advertising trope I’ve seen is being so attractive your husband wants to skip work. Take this Parachute Advansed lotion ad and a similar one by Nivea. In the former, a woman, after inexplicably sleeping in a sari, finds her husband aroused by her softness in the morning. In both that and the Nivea ad, the wives have to basically push the working stiffs out the door.

I’ve seen these huge billboards in Rajagiriya and Nugegoda advertising 19XXX.org. I think this is a reference to the candidate number of Madhura Vithana and the three checks a voter would make. The site itself is just an image asking to keep Colombo clean. Not great, but not disastrous. Type in 19XXX.com, however, as I did by accident and you are directed straight to porn.

This seems to be an Airtel sponsored flash mob in Colombo, outside Colombo Fort Railway Station. A bunch of young people get together and just start dancing. I have seen young people protesting there, but never dancing. It’s pretty cool. This is a blog post so I’ll try to fill it out a little.

This Mahindra ad is otherwise unexceptional corporate soft-porn, except at about 0:50, where it cuts to Egyptians waving flags in what appears to be Tahrir square. That’s a stunning turnaround for commodification of revolution. It took years for Che Guevera to go from fighter to torturer/tyrant to T-shirt. The Egyptian revolution is already being used by an Indian company to sell, if not cars, then that good company smell.

ODEL is Sri Lanka’s main department store (that and House Of Fashions). They also used to run the only real fashion photography. Sadly, their advertising has now gone to the dogs. Literally. ODEL used to feature great Indian and Sri Lankan models wearing, you know, interesting clothes. Now their marketing is dominated by the owner’s dog, in cartoon form. Either that or black and white pictures of western celebrities copied from the Internet (inside branches). It’s kinda depressing.