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Open letter to Whoever-The-Fuck-Created-This-HSBC-Ad

Dear HSBC,

Here is an advertisement your bank released in today’s edition of HT Business. I found this ad perplexing at multiple levels, and wanted to have a chat with you about it.

Do we live 'below the equator' in India?

Let’s start with the sardar wearing a kilt. Groan stereotype groan. With a bar on top telling you the location, I feel it wasn’t necessary. Not everyone in Scotland wears a kilt.

What really baffles me is the heading:

Living below the equator doesn’t mean you won’t be recognized above it.

Newsflash, dear HSBC – no part of India is “below the equator”, definitely no part of India where non-kilt-wearing Punjab da puttars live. You, HSBC, started off as Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation and are now headquartered in London. None of the cities – Hong Kong, Shanghai, London – are “below the equator” either, so you can’t weasel out using that excuse.

For an ad marketing premium banking services to a geographically displaced traveller (probably people you refer to internally in the bank as “high-value customers”, as if they are some sort expensive cattle to be reined in within a ranch), [start sarcasm] this ad inspires great confidence in you bank’s capabilities [end sarcasm]. Do you know how intelligent you come off as in this ad, HSBC? You sound as if a bunch of hillbilly rednecks who “dun ‘now no thang ’bout this geology thang”.

Pictured - HSBC's marketing team. Guy on extreme right of picture is the customary zombie employee hired for equal opportunity purposes.

What’s that I hear you say, HSBC? Your employees didn’t make this ad? You hired an ad agency to do it? Well then, surely somebody in your company would have at least looked at an ad you were going to spend millions funding, right? Right?

It would have worked in Australia. It would have worked in South Africa. India? I think not.

Until the next time then, HSBC, or perhaps, never…

Love and kisses,

Ankur x

PS – It would be so fucking ironic, dear HSBC, if my blog started showing ads from your bank around this blog post. You may have a laugh about that at my expense. kthxbai.

Update: Someone from an IP address belonging to ‘HSBC Bank Plc, London’ has been reading this page for over six hours today. Maybe they’d want to fill out the butthurt report form.

Categories
Personal Reflections

A word about the new design

I have been meaning to change things around here for a while. What started off as a good design has gradually ended up as cluttered, slow, and with multiple ads shoved down its throat. Much of the slowness resulted from the fact that on pageload your browser would scamper off to fetch ads from multiple ad networks. After a point, I realized that all of this was diverging away from the real reason why I started blogging – to display content that I write and like.

So I evaluated the effectiveness of the various ad networks that I was using the result was unequivocal. Barring Google AdSense, every other ad network else is a pile of horsedung that can’t even scratch out a few dollars. Off with their head then. Google AdSense on the other hand is very effective and it pays the bills, so that stays.

When I started to look for a new design, I wanted one that pulled focus towards the content on the blog, rather than navigational elements that are extraneous to the design. This theme that I’m using now is called ‘Wu Wei‘, and it has been designed by Jeff Ngan – apparently according to Taoist principles. (Although, I’m fairly sure the book of Taoist design principles has nothing to say on the subject of AdSense. I had to wing it when integrating ads into my blog.)

Love this new theme!

Update: I forgot to add this. You might have also noticed that I have changed my filing system. The number of categories has been stripped down to a bare minimum. Specific topics that I used to speak about earlier are being tagged as such instead.

Update 2: Shucks, I keep forgetting stuff. Another change that I have made is that I’ve reduced the number of plugins used to just a few backend ones (for better database management, sitemap generation et al). So when you load the page, you don’t have to wait for sharing / PDF printing / podcasting / contact form etc plugins to process the page and then send it your browser. While there were people who were using sharing / PDF printing, if someone wants to really share a link they’ll go ahead and do so anyway. For the rest – and majority – of the readers, reducing plugin usage will significantly speed up pageload speeds. As it is the theme is lean on resources.

(I hope this I’ve covered everything and this is the last ‘update’ I need to make to this blog post.)