Not Playing ‘Fair’ At NDTV

Dear NDTV 24X7, did you forget to send NDTV Good Times the memo about shunning fairness creams?

WrittenBy:Rajyasree Sen
Date:
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Update: After publication of the article, NDTV Good Times’ Chief Executive Officer Smeeta Chakrabarti has sent us the following statement:

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As of last evening we have informed the agency that we will not be proceeding with this campaign in light of the fact that this is also a fairness product.
We are in the process of discussions with the client to the above effect.
NDTV Good Times has taken the Ponds BB cream commercial off.
We stand by our commitment to not carry ads on fairness creams.

If you’d tuned in to NDTV 24X7 on March 14, 2015, the cockles of your heart would have been warmed by a programme anchored by none other than Prannoy Roy, Executive Co-Chairperson, NDTV Group. The programme was titled, “What’s Your Choice: Say No to Colour Discrimination”. The programme focused on prejudice against dark skin and majorly on the role that fairness creams and advertising of the same, play in deepening this prejudice.

The introductory statement made by Roy, accurately said – “There is one social evil that is widespread and deep rooted in India, and nothing, absolutely nothing, is being done to change it – it’s the widespread discrimination based on the colour of your skin. White is beautiful, dark is ugly. Colour prejudice in India is not only widespread, analysts say it’s getting worse every decade. They say forget the fact that nothing is being done to change discrimination based on the colour of one’s skin – on the contrary – we seem to be doing our best to make this prejudice deeper and more pernicious. We sell products, creams and gels and allow advertisements that reinforce this social evil”.

The episode was part of a series where “social experiments” are conducted by actors playing out certain situations in public areas to see how people react to those situations. In between these social experiments, which included a woman in a restaurant telling another woman that she was too dark to marry her brother, Roy gave further commentary and opinion on fairness creams.

He said, “You heard her, she appeals to all our actors and creative minds not to produce advertisements that white skin is ideal and dark skin is a disaster. Young thinking India asks, don’t reinforce social evils, don’t reinforce and colour prejudice in India. Stop those advertisements they say for whiteness creams. Don’t base beauty just on the colour of someone’s skin. Unfortunately selling creams which promise to make you white is a multi-thousand crore business in India. So self-restraint seems to be a losing battle against huge profits. In fact, the ASCI had prohibited ads for whitening creams which say that you’ll get a better job or a better husband if you’re fairer. These may have been stopped but other more subtle ads which reinforce colour prejudice still exist today. Frankly, white is beautiful is the ugly underbelly of the ad belly of India”.

And finally says, “Reinforcing a social prejudice against people born with darker skin is a fundamental social discrimination issue, with many of the same characteristics that racism has. And it just cannot be equated with makeup.”

I, for one, was most impressed. Roy is truly a veteran of Indian journalism, and for him to step up and herald a programme decrying fairness creams and propagation of colour prejudice is laudable. And this wasn’t the only show NDTV 24X7 did on the topic. In just March 2014, NDTV 24X7 has aired ten separate programmes against fairness creams and colour prejudice.

In fact, Roy, in another edition of the same series, “What’s Your Choice”, says the following.

“We, at NDTV, inspired by India’s youngsters, have made a decision. We will not accept any more advertising that says white skin is more beautiful than dark skin – no more of those virtually racist ads.”

But March is over and with it has vanished NDTV’s good intentions, it seems. Because come July 5, 2015 when I opened HT Brunch, this is the two page spread I was greeted with.

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Could my eyes be fooling me? Or was it true that NDTV Good Times (which is part of the NDTV Group) has a show called “Get The Look”, which has Pond’s WHITE BEAUTY BB+ Cream as its main sponsor? Pond’s WHITE Beauty BB+ Cream is a WHITENING breakthrough by the Pond’s Institute. And the Pond’s promise is that of “Instant, Spot-less FAIRNESS everyday.” Basically a ticket to Paradise City, where the grass is green and the girls are white and pretty.

Just to make sure that I wasn’t confused, I actually watched the entire show (Twenty-two minutes of my life which I will never get back). And here’s what I saw. Pond’s BB+ Cream was indeed the title sponsor of the show. No points for guessing who took the Hypocrite’s Oath.

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Also, remember how Roy iterated that fairness creams were not makeup? Well, maybe he’ll change his mind after reading the large print of the ad copy which tells all us darkies to, “Ditch those layers of makeup to an all in one solution like Ponds BB+”. NDTV Group, now that you’ve sold your soul to the dark side (pun intended), at least you could have maintained some consistency in messaging.

Now, I don’t expect much from NDTV Good Times’ beauty shows going by the fact that they’ve always placed a premium on telling women that their looks need to fit an ideal, through various shows. There is the horror that is Band Baaja Bride which advises perfectly normal looking women to plump up the left side of their lip as it’s lopsided or remove their epidermis because it’s dry and spotty. Then like a reality version of Nip/Tuck, we are shown these women in their early Twenties, being injected with collagen and undergoing various kinds of reconstructive surgery, while a beaming host looks on and tells them they look wonderful now. So, Get The Look is simply keeping to form.

But what happened to the stand against fairness creams? NDTV Good Times is after all a part of NDTV Group. If the news channel and the Executive Chairman is promoting – and commendably so – a stand against colour prejudice, shouldn’t its other channels follow suit as well? Or as Roy said in the show, is it true that “…selling creams which promise to make you white is a multi-thousand crore business in India. So self-restraint seems to be a losing battle against huge profits”?

It’s bad enough that they’re taking advertising from a fairness cream – and this holds true for HT Brunch as well. What makes it worse is that NDTV has promoted the Dark Is Beautiful campaign and positioned itself as standing against colour prejudice and fairness creams. Which now comes across as a lot of hogwash. To give an extreme example, this is akin to BBC News doing a series of programmes against racial prejudice and then taking on the Ku Klux Klan as key sponsor on a BBC Entertainment show on what makes for happy communities.

Is it too much to expect a channel of NDTV’s calibre to put their money where their mouth is? Or should we simply jot this down as yet another example of everything being fair in the world of marketing and self-posturing?

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