Porok - The XBOX 360 Commercial..

XBOX 360 was launched quite sometime back, and in India, the first commercial that was aired, was in my opinion, an advertising masterpiece. At least for its time, it certainly was. The advertisement has nothing nerdy in it, no technical jargon; in fact nothing fancy about it.

The entire advertisement is setup in a village. All through the advertisement, you'll see and hear people talking about 'Porok', which is a sport played in rural India, wherein one has to take the stance of a fighter cock, and butt the opponent out of the circle in order to win the game. As the advertisement moves on, they've shown how 'Porok' becomes popular in a village, the noteworthy point being the rate at which its popularity soars.

The advertisement creators thought that 'Porok' was so weird and wonderful that they took this sport and blew it out of proportion (as you'll see in the advertisement) to denote the power of gaming.

Another interesting thing is that the language spoken by the villagers is a mix of a variety of Indian native languages, which kept me guessing for a long time. Many friends made a lot of claims - none of them turned out to be true. We eliminated a lot of languages that we knew ourselves, but India, having a considerable number of states, each of which has its own language, makes it difficult to say which is the one being spoken. The subtitles do the job though of conveying the meaning of whatever gibberish one can hear in the background.

The advertisement ends with the tagline "game on", which is the XBOX 360 tagline, and the last line spoken before the tagline, actually translates to "Porok afternoon cock horn, eunuch inside big bangle insect".

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Advertisement details and credits
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Product:

• XBOX

Title:

• Porok

Agency:

• MTV India

Creatives:

• Cyrus Oshidar (Executive Creative Director)

• K. M. Ayappa (Copywriter)

• Mahendra Bhatula (Copywriter)

• Hiren Kapadia (Agency Producer)

Director(s):

• Mahendra Bhatula

• K. M. Ayappa

Prod. Co:

• MTV India

Country:

• India

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game on!