Paint peeling off crumbling walls, leaky ceilings, dusty, mud-brown rexine chairs and geriatric men from an era departed. The first guess would be: a scene from a squalid shanty in Mumbai's ubiquitous slums. But it was actually the set of an award-winning ad film, released two years ago, featuring a toothless and doddering barber, a loser looking for a cool hairdo and a wicked background score by Shankar-Ehsaan-Loy.

STAY COOL WITH COKE The setting, an old-world barbershop, is an attempt to show that Coke is integrated into our lives. The ad won Prasoon Joshi a Gold Lion at Cannes.

Set in a ramshackle barber's shop, the Center Shock commercial neither had any signs of modernity nor any youthful exuberance. Departing from the clichéd college campus settings reserved for chocolate, candy and mint advertisements, ad filmmaker Prasoon Pandey and his team created the grungiest barbershop that was at least 40 years past its prime.

The commercial was a hit. It spurred a wave of "downmarket" (for the lack of a better defining term) advertisements. From the spotless settings of the 1990s where the streets were always clean, the models gorgeous and the mood contrived, the shift to grubby locales, rustic imagery and ordinary looking, often ugly, characters was something the man in the street could relate to. Out went the synthetic sets. In came the old-school barbershops, bustling railway stations, colourful paan shops, mucky, crowded streets and dingy bars.

"For too long the consumer has been treated like an idiot," says Piyush Pandey, group president and national creative director, Ogilvy & Mather. "No one could relate to ads because they looked like ads. Now we are scripting stories with real-life characters and settings." So you have Coke commercials in a barbershop, a wayside inn and a roadside stall, Chlormint at a paan shop, Fevicol on a train and in a nondescript unfinished structure, Hutch in a barbershop and Mentos in a seedy bar.

GLUED TO LIFE Ramshackle building, villagers, a suicide attempt. The ad conveyed "the message of life"-glue it with Fevicol-through two elderly men in a comical situation.

There are many more. In the past two years there has been a significant thrust towards portraying locations otherwise considered downmarket. Advertising in the 1990s was geared towards creating aspiration among the middle class. Hence the grand sets, foreign locales and western outlook. "Now there is a perverse delight in looking back at how far we have come," says Prahlad Kakkar of Genesis Films. "We are not ashamed any more of who we are and how we smell."

Cashing in on this sentiment are not just indigenous brands but global ones like Coke and Yahoo!. They realised the importance of localising and have not stopped at Indian metros but delved into the hinterland for their stories and locales. Prasoon Joshi, national creative director, McCaan Erikson, and architect of the innovative "thanda matlab Coca-Cola" series, believes we looked at the West for inspiration earlier. "Not any more. We are modernised but not westernised. We embrace western culture but put our own spin to it. And I don't think there is anything downmarket about it."

The popularity of the commercials can be judged by the buzz they create among the public. The Coke slogan induced a cult following, the Hutch campaign featuring the adorable pug and boy has spawned three imitations and doubled the prices of pugs in the pet market and Chlormint's "Dobaara mat poochna" has crept into street lingo.

A more tangible measure of the commercials' success is the awards they garner. The Coke barbershop ad won a Gold Lion at Cannes last year. And recently at the Abby's-the Academy Awards of Indian advertising-the Hutch, Coke and Fevicol campaigns walked away with several awards.

HAIR-RAISING EFFECT A barbershop is not the location one expects to sell a gum from. But this ad defied all convention and created an interest in the "really, really sour gum".

While Center Shock and Coke may have ushered in a spurt of such commercials it was in fact Fevicol, the Pidilite Industries' brand, that first employed a rustic setting when all other brands were donning a modern avatar. This was nine years ago. The commercials featured carpenters not in denim overalls and bandanas but soiled vests and grimy pyjamas. There were no models but people who looked most ordinary. It was a risky, yet a very successful campaign. Still, it took a long time for others to follow suit.

Now there is no dearth of ads spewing local dialects and Indian images. The locations may seem very casual but a lot of effort goes into creating the sets. And it is actually far more expensive than posh commercials as the authenticity to achieve local flavour demands a diligent eye for detail. The set for the Center Shock ad was built in a studio in suburban Mumbai over three days. "It involved recreating a whole period," says Prasoon Pandey.

MINTING PAANWAALA This Chlormint commercial, set at a paan dukaan, stars a bespectacled loser and a garrulous paanwalla and not a pretty face saying saason ki taazgi.

The premise is simple. We may reside in metros but our roots lie in rural India. And this is true of the three ad filmmakers who breathed fresh life into Indian advertising when they shunned the status quo. The Pandey brothers and Joshi were born and raised in towns like Jaipur and Almora respectively. "They have a feel for local language. They dream in their native tongue and write copy in two languages," says Kakkar. "It is bound to reflect in what they create."

Joshi agrees. His best ideas have come to him while travelling through villages. Prasoon Pandey makes it a point to take the neighbourhood children to village fairs and one of Piyush's proudest moments was when he got the chance to conceive and write the lyrics for Mile sur mera tumhara. "Advertising is not about fantasy, people want a slice of life," says Piyush. Fantasy is best left to Bollywood.