COVID-19 has almost ruined the romantic date and outing with your partner. However, what they did was cancel thousands of dates by many months and, as a consequence, making the ‘date’ more difficult by couples than it ever was. And on their first date, we’re not talking to couples, no. We’re talking about just about any kind of couple.
Take the latest Parle ad named ‘Cafe’ for illustration. It features a young couple meeting each other after months, a boy and a girl. They have talked on video chats and calls for aeons, but now it’s time to see more of the other face-to-face it’s like a blind date.
We see both of them meeting at a cafe, the latest Indian advertising post the lockdown with a new scene, and the girl asks her boyfriend if he misses her. What’s he say? He says nothing except sits down instead and takes a pair of gloves from his bag; safety comes before romance.
Once the pair wears the gloves, as they hear the server approach, their hands touch then quickly abandon each other; certain things never alter.
And toward the end of the commercial, as the girl leaves for her house, she pauses to scold him because they spoke to each other for hours on the phone before the lockdown, so now when they meet, “You have nothing to say,” after the lockdown.
That’s where they search into the bag to extract a Hide & Seek pack and we see the girl extract a Milano pack from their bag. The two, it turns out, had a tradition of exchanging Parle biscuits each time they met. It’s exactly what the commercial, #ToNewBeginnings, says in its title.
Earlier, Parle came up with another commercial emphasising the value of mask and gloves. The film captured how Parle staff are constantly conducting their duties while ensuring that established sanitisation procedures are implemented. The devices are disinfected, and the workers wear masks and gloves all the time, beginning with workers receiving thermal scanning at the entrances.
