It would be more graceful (not to mention the right thing to do) to apologise when you make a mistake, wittingly or unwittingly, and withdraw a bad advertisement.
But apparently, KFJ Gold seems determined to dig itself deeper into a mess that it finds itself in.
Some days ago, KFJ Gold asked customers to SMS “Tension” to the number 54242, telling senders that they would receive a reply on August 15, as to what that tension was, and how they could get rid of it.
This corresponded with an advertisement they put out, stating “Kalyana vayasula ponnu irundhaale tension dhaane!” (Tamil), meaning that a girl of marriageable age was a source of “tension”. The advert had appeared in the print media as well as on television and was endorsed by actor and director Prakash Raj.
However, according to a report in The Hindu , S Safiath a Chennai-based lawyer filed a Public Interest Litigation petition against the advertisement with the Madras High Court. It will come up for hearing on Monday.
The advertisement has also appeared in Malayalam and Telugu languages.
After the advertisement became public and word spread, people began to slam the ad for its “bad taste”. The store then went into damage control mode, and put up another ad, claiming that the first ad, which claimed that girls were a source of “tension”, were merely teasers and that real ad was yet to come.
Well, no need to wait in breathless anticipation to see how the tension ads could be magically turned into some food for feminist thought. Didn’t happen.
Video ads uploaded onto the store’s YouTube channel were later removed, and the store put up the real ad.
The brilliant damage control ads that the store came up with now read: “Kalyana vayasula ponnu irundhaale tension dhaane!” followed by the words “DEFINITELY NOT” (in capitals). What followed, was an exercise in stupidity. The tagline in the ad reads: “Getting your daughter’s wedding jewellery of her choice, of the lowest market rate is the tension”.
Same difference really.
The upside to all this is that be it Kalyan Jewellers’ Aishwarya Rai ad, then Krishniah Chetty’s “dowri” box, or KFJ, people are calling out advertisers when they see something wrong with the advertisements.
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