Dad of Ads

He is surely the man India is looking up to. He is what ‘Youngistaan’ wants to be. He is finally what India was yearning for all these years. Not the Rahul of Dil To Pagal Hai, who goes off to sleep in designer clothes and gurgles cola first thing in the morning, but the one who’s closer to existing concepts. One, who gets off his Mercedes outside his small hometown, gets his teammates to stick their tongues out after grabbing a catch and leads the ‘Ishtylebaaz’ pack in the locality. Mahendra Singh Dhoni is on his way to become the biggest cricketer-ad icon of the country and the latest news is that he has already put a price tag higher than that of Sachin Tendulkar at his peak on himself for a commercial! As of March 2007, MSD had 17 endorsements. Big Bazaar, Lafarge India added their names to the list ever since and Dainik Bhaskar, one of the leading Hindi dailies in the country signed him as their brand ambassador.

According to market reports, the Dhoni brand which was valued at Rs.1 Crore before the T20 World Cup final in Johannesberg in September last year, shot up to Rs. 3 Crore overnight. And it’s been on an uphill climb ever since!

The Indian ad-industry largely depends on filmstars (male actors are convincingly outnumbered by their female colleagues), who continue to portray larger-than-life images and cricketers. Understandably so, as these are the two most glamorous professions in the country. Farookh Engineer was the first cricketer on record to endorse a product and ironically, Brylcreem, the hair cream which signed Engineer three decades back, signed Dhoni too. Amongst cricketers, largely iconic figures on and off the field were chosen for TV commercials and not all of them lived up to their reputation.

Multiple factors contributed to MSD’s ad fortune. To start with, the country has become more receptive towards the depiction of normal, regular, usual, at times even mundane occurrences of life on screen (case in point, the triumph of films like Khosla ka Ghosla, Bheja Fry, Honeymoon Travels Pvt. Ltd, Namastey London etc.). Secondly, the ad-maker’s policy of sticking to the persona of Mahi and not transforming him into a super human. To top it all, there is nothing funny about Dhoni in the commercials, whether his voice or dance steps. In fact, he turned out to be a natural actor. What must have also helped is the way Dhoni continues to carry himself on the field. His iconic stature is never evident, as if he’s just one of the rest, who’s lucky with the coin and thus, steps forward at the time of toss.

The only thing that does not match his image is his batting and needless to say, that’s the greatest contributing factor behind his success. When the boy-next-door plays those out-of-the-planet shots, Indians find strength in their belief.