Monday Morning Madness

In times of doom and gloom, with newsprint prices headed north again but things looking slightly better on the lay-off front, there should be innovation in print advertising. However most innovation has been for publications to bend over and let advertisers hump their backsides. Alright, even that is, to an extent acceptable, after all, prostituting your bum when you have so many over-paid lazy children to feed might even pass the ‘moral decency’ test as thought up by Messrs Thackerey, Son & Nephew (even though the store front has split into two entrances now). But what really pisses me off are jacket adverts.
You know what I’m talking about, not the full front-page ads that like today in some papers, Yahoo India has taken out – note to yahoo India – If you are going to spend a bomb, spend money on a coked-out bimbette at least. I know ‘You’ means ordinariness, but I don’t wish to be reminded of that first thing in the morning. A half-dressed girl on the other hand, would have really brightened up a Monday morning.
OK, as usual, I digress, my issue is with those painful quarter page adverts. Not to say the full-page ones are by any means acceptable, and for this I will always hate Indya.com (they were the first to make ToI sell out the front page, and before you knew it every second day HT carried a picture of a beaming Ponytail and family) but at least with a full page advert you can hold the paper the way it is meant to be held. With the quarter-page ‘jacket’ advert, you can’t hold jackshit, the paper literally falls apart. You know what I’m talking about. A ‘jacket’ advert is like agreeing to have scat sex.
Seriously. And if you don’t know what scat sex is, please don’t look it up on Google Image Search (with SafeSearch Off) at work (no I won't link it), because as liberal as your office might be to you viewing porn at work, this won’t please anyone. Nor will seeing the fat aunties on India’s top ‘user-generated’ sex video site (no, I won't link to this either), I feel like puking when ‘hot chachis’ like that invade a computer screen (though, the site shows that UGC does work on the Indian web). The popularity of mobile phone video cameras is leading to insanity in Indian bedroom. Bad porn, that is my other problem with the world this Monday morning.
I think I should really see a shrink.
PS: I personally did not exactly fall in love with the first issue of ToI Crest (they have a epaper but not a separate website as yet), but the second issue was a marked improvement (more timely story I guess). My only problem is that the amount of time I have every weekend is finite, and there is far too much to read. I do believe that Crest is going to hammer sales of weekly newsmagazines that have over the years lost the plot (annual sex surveys usually filled with fiction, like that one that claimed that 1 in 3 men ‘did not mastrubate’). It seems that Crest has a pretty high print order right now (estimated at close to 3 lakhs) in only Delhi and Bombay (sorry, Mr.T, Mumbai), and with editions launching in Pune and Bangalore before the end of October, the newsmagazines should be really worried because if this weeks covers are any indication, ToI Crest has already won the battle. That is not to say that ToI Crest might not go wayward very soon.