Book Name: 30 Second Thrillers
Author: K.V. Sridhar
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Rating: 4.7/5
Book Blurb: The book will be a landmark in itself because it will be the first to cover behind the scenes of every loved ad, right from the Doordarshan days to today’s YouTube; right from ‘Chal meri luna’ to ‘Airtel smartphone ads’. It will cover interviews of creative heads and directors of all generations, right from vintage to new age. Author has handpicked each ad based on their popularity among viewers and met its creators and talked to them about the entire process. He had left out the marketing jargons and advertising sham and just weaved stories using wonderful stories. The book will feature legendary ad-creators like Alyque Padamsee, Piyush Pandey, Prahlad Kakkar, R Balki, Prasoon Joshi, Prasoon Pandey, Agnello Dias, KS Chakravarty, Prakash Varma, Nitesh Tiwari, Preeti Nair, Ram Madhvani, Kailash Surendranath, Amit Sharma, Ashish Khajanji, Parshuraman, AG Krishnamurthy, Shantanu Sheorey and many more. One unique aspect about this book is the coming together of virtually the entire ad industry.
Book Review: K.V. Sridhar has managed to combine little snippets from the ad film industry and has told the back story of almost all major advertisements from India. For this task, he gets all the industry’s bigwigs to share their stories and compiles them in the form of 30 second thrillers.
Indian advertisements have created some legends and are highly creative. If the film industry can make use of even half the talent and creativity that we see in advertisements, our films would be far better and worth cherishing rather than garbage stuff that is currently rolled out year after year.
Right from the famous Vodafone ad that featured a pug and a little boy to the famous Fevicol advertisements have been featured in this book. It’s fascinating to learn how a simple short ad film takes so much time and effort for it to look flawless on television.
Sridhar has narrated it in the form of question-answer which is perhaps the best format for this book. There is hardly an advertisement that is missing here and putting it all together must have required a lot of effort. There is also a QR code that you can scan and watch the ad to satisfy your nostalgia.
Sridhar tells you about the famous Wah Taj advertisement that featured the table maestro Zakir. We also learn the back stories of Surf ads and the Pepsi Cola ad wars are also given a lot of space.
The only downside here is that the entire text doesn’t have a proper structure. It’s sort of all jumbled up but nevertheless, it’s a wonderful book and Sridhar must be lauded for this mammoth effort which would have required a lot of research.