Satire: The making of a Father's Day ad for a ceiling fan brand

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Exactly three weeks before Father's Day, the brand manager's digital calendar pinged. The note simply said FD. He smiled at his own cleverness and sent off an email to his boss. "What say we make an ad for Father's Day?" She replied, "Great thought. Brief the agency."

So the brand manager briefed them. It went like this. "We want to do an ad for Father's Day."

The agency asked, "You sell ceiling fans. What's the connection with Father's Day?"

The brand manager said, "There are fans in every home. And there are fathers in nearly every home. Usually fathers tend to choose the brand of a fan, so they are terribly important to us. I'm sure you can find some way to make a connection... By the way, it will be really nice if the ad appeals to a woke mindset. But the ad will run just for a day, so no Baahubali budgets, please."

The agency groped for ideas at the intersection of air circulation, wokefulness, fatherhood, and small production budgets. The planner regurgitated insights from earlier Father's Day briefs. The creatives studied all the great dad ads. The AE chewed his finger nails. They had used up a week.

The creatives tossed thoughts around like basketball players practicing shots before a game. Everyone was shooting randomly from different angles. The creative director tried hard to find an idea that didn't come with a strong sense of déjà vu. The team kept shooting.

Usually, a dad teaches a kid to climb a tree, ride a bicycle, play a square cut, mix a drink, trim a beard, solder a wire. Sometimes, he hides true emotions, buys sanitary pads, understands a homosexual child, skips big meetings to watch his kid's terrible play. And at other times, the dad is actually the single mom—he's the one who gives up his dreams to make the kids' dreams come true or the one staying up late waiting for teenage daughter to come home.

The AE asked, a little worried, "What about the ceiling fan? These could be for any brand, no?"

The copywriter ad-libbed, "Oh, dad is looking up at the fan from his rocking chair, waiting for his daughter when all these memories flood his mind. We use the speeding fan between shots as a transition device. We end with the father falling asleep under the fan, daughter tiptoeing in, covering him with a blanket, and kissing him on the forehead. The father smiles as she goes to her room. He was just pretending to be asleep."

The earnest AE said, "Didn't you pitch this idea to our coffee client already?" The writer answered warily, "Dads are dads, coffee ho ya ceiling fan."

Just then another writer said, "Hey, I saw this tweet saying, Indian dads don't wake you up, they just switch off the fan. Can we do something with that?". The creative director perked up. "Wait, that's the first fresh thought I've heard so far."

And that's how the agency created an ad that did the rounds on WhatsApp for a few days, got a few inches in a bunch of websites, and would hopefully, eventually make it to a few shortlists for award shows.

The brand manager set an alert on his digital calendar, for exactly three weeks before Childrens' Day, thinking, "Boy, am I good at my work or what?"

The writer is a founder and creative director at Cartwheel

The thoughts and opinions shared here are of the author.