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Indians wanted to diss Surf Excel, ended up giving bad ratings to MS Excel on Playstore

Mar 12, 2019, 17:03 IST
A screen grab of the controversial Surf Excel advertisementSurf Excel YouTube channel
  • Indians are sharing negative reviews for MS Excel on the Google Playstore and are also uninstalling the app.
  • This is a result of the backlash faced by Surf Excel for its ad showing a Hindu girl and Muslim boy for its recent ad for the Indian festival Holi.
  • The ad already has over 9.5 million views on YouTube.
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A detergent ad for the Indian festival Holi ended up getting the wrath of trolls – except that they hit the wrong target.

Surf Excel which wanted to show religious harmony by portraying a Hindu girl and Muslim boy in their ad, faced backlash for apparently promoting ‘love jihad’ and also for calling the colours of Holi as ‘daag’ (stain). So, a section of Indians decided to share bad ratings for Surf Excel, except that they ended up doing it for MS Excel.

Indians are posting negative reviews and bad ratings for MS Excel on Playstore calling the app ‘anti-national’.

The ad was also resented by Muslims who reportedly didn’t like that a Muslim boy needed the help of a Hindu girl to go ahead with his prayer.

When the ad was released, #BoycottSurfExcel trended while another section of social media users were perplexed about how an ad could trigger so much hate and anger.

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The ad which has been around since February 27, had gone on to have over 9.5 million views on YouTube.

See Also:

Indian political parties are not going to hold back on advertising during the general elections
BJP spends too much on political advertising on Facebook as Congress spends too little — yet again
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