Mobiquity

Just put the finishing touches to my paper for Atticus this year.

Called Mobiquity = Mobile + Ubiquity, it's an attempt to look at the near future impact of the ubiquitous mobile phone!

Zillion thanks to Reshma, who did the quali research for the same & co-wrote it...

We looked at the device, the interface, mobile through an emerging market lens as well as the techno-social impact of the phone!

This surely ranks amongst the coolest research work I/ we did in a long time!

Will soon write a column to share the findings in the public domain!!

Digital is Unevenly Distributed...

On Monday, Jan 21st, Tribal DDB Worldwide became the first Digital Shop/ agency/ global digital brain to Win the Ad Age Global Agency Network of the Year!!

Big Congrats to them!!

This marks the first time in history that a digital company has won this honour!

You can check the full story here

Maybe, things will change from a 30sec obsession to more digital solutions in India as well...

Although, have you ever heard a Balki, Piyush, Pops, Chax, Aggie, etc. talk about the internet, new media, digital, UGC...I haven't! LOL

Prasoon might be an exception. He did talk about Second Life in a ET/ DNA article last year...

The digital lead is already being taken by the likes of Tribal DDB, Webchutney, PC Webwise, Pinstorm, Quasar, Creative Avenues, etc.

Later WPP, IPG and Omnicom companies will buy them at fat sums:-)( Quasar was lapped up by WPP Digital a short while ago)

At the moment, digital is unevenly distributed - the thinking, the creatives, the planners, the urgency, the talent and the CEO priority...

Bono-vita 2

It's been a busy week till now. Meetings, travel, more meetings...

Planner time is the most elastic resource in an agency. It can be consumed for almost anything!

On days like these, I always perk myself with a glass of milk, a spoon of Chywanprash and some Bono-vita(just kidding)

Edward De Bono-vita thoughts...
1. "The ability to send hundreds of e-mails does not ensure the ability to write something intelligent or amusing."

How about an e-mail free day every week? And then check employee productivity! Or our own. What about Thursdays? :-)

2. "Everything is fine but the ship is still heading in the wrong direction."

Have you had that feeling lately?

Less Gas, More Ass

Was browsing through the year end Outlook magazine, Images 2007! Spotted this unique Naked Eco-activism/protest against oil dependency and car culture!

The photographer is Spencer Tunick...Cyclists in London, Paris, Amsterdam, Vancouver, Madrid have joined the 'Less Gas, More Ass' movement!

Mumbai is next on Spencer's itinerary LOL

There is a whole lot of creativity that is required in the eco-activism space with or without ass-baring!

Mental note - think about the 'Mumbai Batti Band' campaign...What can be done to actually cut down the metro's electricity consumption even as the Reliance IPO shrieks Power On. India On:-)

Kick Ass Manifesto

You can read it better here!

Stumbled upon this kick-ass manifesto of Webchutney, amongst India's hottest/ coolest digital full service agencies...Have a dekko at their blog here!

Don't think any Indian traditional offline agency has a blog yet! Correct me if I am wrong!

You can find 3 real cool webchutney virals here...(viral classics like Thakur Ka Inteqam, Makkad-man and Ali Baba(done for the Airtel ring-tone) LOL

Who Needs Advertising When You Have a Nano!

By now you must have heard & seen it all. The Buzz. The Bytes and the hottening Bazaar for the Nano.

The giga byte Nano surround sound!!

I can't remember when was the last time I really got excited about a car launch(actually any product)!!

A friend called me excitedly as CNBC broke the launch story from the Auto Expo...

In the evening I caught up with a high-decibel and a not-so-high quality debate on NDTV with Suhel Seth, R K Pachauri(noble winner), Sunita Narain(Centre for Science & Environment) and Medha Patkar...

Had a debate about the Nano with my wife in the morning over chai! Thought about it(about the road congestion, about buying it, about gifting it:-) about getting it's ad account) all through yesterday!!

Sample the headlines in the various dailies today...

HT - H/L : Small wonder
Body Copy : It is green, it is global, it is Indian. It costs a lakh and it
is called the Nano.

TOI - H/L : Tata Reinvents the Wheel
Body Copy : Others said No. Tata said Nano

HT Mint - H/l : Tata Small Car Throws a Big Punch
Body copy : Ratan Tata's personal quest ends in a winner!

ET - H/L : Nano Second to None
Body Copy : Dream car's brush with history

Indian Express - H/L : 1 lakh car drives 1 billion dreams
Body Copy : Little Nano, the big thing!

As I open my gmail in the morning, my friend and benevolent spamster - Ramakant has already sent me a Nano pix and sound bytes & another friend has sent some stories about the making of the Nano!

However, in sharp contract to the Giga Buzz, the paid ad by Rediff(Full Page in TOI) was quite mediocre(though the car looks beautiful in the layout), low on energy and perhaps quite unnecessary!

The Rediff Nano ad reads...
H/L : It's here. The new Tata Nano
To end all speculation, debate and talk!

Okay, thanks for telling me that!! But Mr. Advertising Agency, you are 24 hours late, got nothing new to tell and need a better copy-writer. Try HT, Indian Express...

Of course, I maybe too immersed in the Nano; but so is the nation...And as communications people, who need to have a pulse on the nation's psyche...this ad should have been done differently(if at all)

Quick thoughts on how I wud have done it...Actually, no why give ideas for free:-)

But the point is it would have paid(like hell) to take into account the context of a national frenzy around a dream car. Plug into the conversation of the people. And I don't mean higher SEC people who e-mail, search, blog, twitter, orkut, facebook it only!

Plug into even the choupal conversations, the adda, udipi, nukkad conversations...(Maybe it's all coming around the corner. Maybe this rant is a bit early...)

But for God's sake, add something to that conversation. However, Nano it might be or get out of the way and save some precious media budgets!

Let TOI, Aaj Tak, Dainik Jagran, Punjab Kesari and Saamna do the job well.

Nano is a small car but a big paradigm shift! Can advertising build a philosophy around the car?

It's not so much about positioning. In the long run, it's more about the new priorities and the complex questions (environmental, ethical, etc.)that the Nano will throw up!

Can Nano be the desire to celebrate 'Less is More'. Of reducing the carbon and other foot-print, of using less resources....Then communication has a role!

Otherwise, to sell a cute 1 lakh car, who needs advertising!!

Bono-vita

"If we ask children below the age of 10(maybe lower) to draw a spacecraft, they will design their own design.

After the age of 10, they will draw a rocket with N.A.S.A written on the side!!

We think we like children to be children but create conditions( generally speaking) where they prefer to act like adults as soon as possible:-(" - from Edward de Bono's book 'New Thinking for the New Millennium'

The Salt Curve

I want to do a Edward de Bono week...I came in contact with this father of lateral thinking at the 'dilli gate' second hand book bazaar over a decade back(maybe more...)

Since then I have been regularly snacking on his ideas and concepts. It's a bit difficult and exhausting to read a Edward Bono cover to cover, but snacking Bono regularly has been both delicious and healthy!!

In his book, New Thinking for the New Millennium, Bono has argued that our judging system is flawed as we believe that 'if something is good, then surely more of that thing is better'!

No salt in the food makes it bad/ bland. When we add a little salt,it tastes good. But if we add more of the salt, it tastes bad again!

Technology is good. So more technology is better. However, it took more than two decades for worker productivity to actually rise after computers were first introduced in offices in the US.

Communication is good. So more communication is better. But I feel there was more information, more emotion and better communication in the monthly letter I wrote to my parents during my engineering days than the daily staccato communication on the mobile phone!

Blogging is good. So twitter is better!! Highly questionable I feel...

Humour in ads is good. So more humour in all ads is better??

Information is good. So more information is better. But 100 slide power-points often have less to tell than a 20 slide presentation!! More information might actually clog human decision making ability. And intuition tells me is the number one planner malaise:-)

de Bono's Salt Curve is therefore a great concept to keep in mind when devising communication solutions!

The Young in India : 18 to 80:-)

Nice article by Vir Sanghvi in HT Mint where he questions why India doesn't want to give power to it's young in various walks of life. You can read the entire article here.


Big chunks from the article...
1. A couple of weeks ago, The Observer(London) bragged about a generational change in the UK. Prime Minister Gordon Brown(age 56) is increasingly being seen as too old and too tired to inspire the country.

In the same week, the BJP named L.K. Advani its prime ministerial candidate. If Advani ever gets to be prime minister, he will be more than 80 by the time he moves into Race Course Road.

The present incumbent, Manmohan Singh, is in his 70s. His rivals for the job within the Congress (Arjun Singh, Pranab Mukherjee, etc.) are the same vintage.

2. David Cameron(the Conservative leader) who may well defeat Brown at the next election, is 41. Which is almost the same age as Rahul Gandhi. And we regard Rahul Gandhi as too young to become a cabinet minister.

3. On media. Rajdeep Sardesai and Barkha Dutt are young editors of TV channels. But most of their counterparts in the TV and magazine world are over 50. Both Prannoy Roy and Raghav Bahl are far older than Sardesai.

On the entertainment side, Kunal Dasgupta (Sony) and Pradeep Guha (Zee) are in their 50s. The vast majority of print editors are 50 or older.

Shekhar Gupta, at 50, is probably the most youthful, but N. Ram, Aveek Sarkar, Vinod Mehta, Aroon Purie, Prabhu Chawla, M.J. Akbar, Chandan Mitra and Mrinal Pande are all 50-plus. So are both of India’s most powerful press barons. Shobhana Bhartia, vice-chairperson of HT Media Ltd is 50 and Samir Jain is probably three or four years older.

4. It is the same with business. Even if you take Ratan Tata (70) out of the mix, just look at the ages of the high-profile industrialists who have come to symbolize the new India: Nandan Nilekani, Mukesh Ambani, Anand Mahindra, Sunil Mittal, etc.

They are all around 50 or more (the exception is probably Kumar Mangalam Birla, who is much younger, but he took over the family empire in unusual circumstances).

5. Sanghvi claims he doesn't have answers to India's obsession with the old young! His guess is that India defines youth differently from the rest of the world.

In the West you are ready for a second career when you reach 50. In India, that’s usually the age when you’ve only just reached near the top in your first career.

Isn’t it time we took demographics into account and recognized that an “emerging superpower” cannot be run by emerging pensioners?

On Being Creative 1

I have been struggling to write this first post of the year. Planners block in week one is not a good sign:-)

But I wanted to write about something happy, hopeful but most of all on the subject of being creative!

Luckily for me I stumbled upon Hugh MacLeod's(of the gaping void blog fame)this very old post(by life-on-the-web-standards).

Hugh is an ex agency copy-writer turned marketing strategist. But he is most famous for his cartoon-on-business-cards-concept(am a newly converted fan of his).

You can read the original post - 'How to be Creative'here

Here's my selection from the original spiked a little by my personal experience...

1.Ignore Everybody
And that includes EVERYBODY. Of course not all of them together and not all of them all the time!! LOL

Your spouse. Your parents. Your boss. The once-upon-a-time-mentor. The good-friend-who-always-thinks-good-of-you. The featured-in-the-Brand-Equity-Power List CEO type...

The more original your idea is, the less good advice other people will be able to give you.

2. Everyone is born creative; everyone is given a box of crayons in nursery.

The silo system puts all sorts of department labels to shut you up. But never lose your voice. Don't under-rate your inherent creativity. Write with your heart about the brand. Think taglines while you think strategy or run errands. Better the body copy of the ad if you can. Romance your brand in words slapped on gettyimages!

Think media neutral solutions. Think fearlessly. Talk about them. e-mail them to other people. Blog about them.

As a planner I have written print ads for clients, read out TV scripts at new business pitches often throwing the CD in a fit of shock, have written 360 brand narratives in new business and more over the year.

It's bloody tough & frustrating at times. But it's doable. And there's always a way for the creative mind:-) Like they will call a planner ad a brand print and other such non-sense! But stay on course. Enjoy the game!

Listen to the little voice(of creativity inside you) or it will die... taking a big chunk of you along with it.

Life has a little box of crayons for all of us. We didn't fear them in nursery, why fear them now?

3. Keep your day job.
THE SEX & CASH THEORY: "The creative person basically has two kinds of jobs: One is the sexy, creative kind. Second is the kind that pays the bills. Sometimes the task in hand covers both bases, but not often. This tense duality will always play center stage. It will never be transcended."

For me this blog is SEX, enduring endless-pointless-meetings CASH.
Leading projects like 'Future of Mobility' SEX, doing 'daak bangla' research CASH
Thinking about planning and creativity as part of my day job is SEX, living 3 days a week in Delhi CASH:-)and Jet miles LOL

4. Hang out with a Changing World
Some people are hip to it, others are not. If you want to be able to afford groceries in 5 years, I'd recommend listening closely to the former and avoiding the latter.

That means hanging out more with the really creative people not labels and visiting cards, the freaks, the real visionaries, than you're already doing.

Thinking more about what their needs are, and responding accordingly.

It doesn't matter what industry we're talking about- architecture, advertising, petrochemicals, journalism- they're around, they're easy enough to find if you make the effort, if you've got something worthwhile to offer in return.

Avoid the dullards; avoid the folk who play it safe. They can't help you any more. Their stability model no longer offers that much stability. They are extinct, they are extinction.

In the past year and a half, it's the conversations with people
outside my department
outside my company,
outside advertising,
outside India,
outside my comfort zone,
outside of what I know that have been really insightful....

The insiders haven't had much to offer:-)

5. Nobody cares. Do it for yourself.

6. Don't worry about finding inspiration. It comes eventually.

7.The best way to get approval is not to need it.

In 2008 and beyond, we will have to get used to a world that will gradually not look like the world in which we have worked till now.

The agencies, our jobs, the power-equations, the concept of what's creative, the supremacy and primacy of 30sec commercials, creativity in the digital domain will require all of us to be more creative in whatever we do...

Related posts on the subject of creativity- The New Creative, Where's the Glue Around Here?, Open Source Creativity