The Pie of Obsession

So much of the news print is wasted on such predictable stuff! It sucks!

Thank God it's Friday...Off to Karjat tomorrow morning:-)

Goafest - Day Zero

For me and a bunch of 'newly acquired' colleagues, day zero(from late afternoon)was largely about beer, singing SD Burman songs and a not-so-bad Dainik Bhaskar party at Blueberrys...

The coming together of Abbys and the Goafest is a great beginning. Now if we have managed to lower the scam quotient of the awards, it wud be sone pe suhaga! But maybe I said it too early and maybe I am too naive in believing a change will happen soon.

Check out the conclave speaker notes if you haven't- 1. Agencies need to be active partners in brand building!

and 2. Agencies Not Bringing Value to the Table Why do we(ad agencies) berate ourselves so much!!!

Looking forward to an early morning splash in the pool:-)

Joshi Saheb, Mudra and Dumbistaan2

I am a double amateur when it comes to appreciating music! But the songs of Taare Zameen Par and in particular the lyrics by Prasoon Joshi have been a constant earworm* for me this month!

The Filmfare award to him for best lyrics(for Maa)is well deserved. Though my favourite is 'Kholo kholo darwaze...' A matter of pride for the advertising industry...Congratulations Joshi Saheb! I am your admirer...(no I don't want a job in McCann planning...LOL)

Away from the glitz of Bollywood, Mudra won an award for Continuous Innovation and HR Strategy at Work by the World HRD Congress! Though it's a little difficult to tell from the HRD's pedestrian web-site and the India-centricity of the awards(in 2006)how global they really are!

But for an industry never really known for it's HR friendliness forget HR innovation this is good news! I hope others get inspired.

And finally I had to reproduce this e-mail sent by a friend of mine(inhabitant of youngistaan)...

hey (insert my name)....finally caught it on youtube...i watched it...n then i watched it again thinkin that maybe i'm slow n maybe i missed the point in the ad....but this defintely is one of the crappier ads SRK has done and lil ranbir is getting quite a reputation for behaving nonsensical...deepika looks way better in anythin else that i've seen her in...she looks like just another girl in this ad...all she hadta do was stand n look pretty but cudnt manage that here...they shud've gotten the same make up artist they used in OSO!!!! lines are drab...idea is moronic...acting is so-so...actually everything about this ad is crap...also read the interview by XYZ of JWT...XYZ may be able to sell the interview to a few weak minds but definitely won't sell any pepsi with this strategy...this calls for a change of agency, people!!!!

Hey guys...I didn't make that up:-)

*Earworms is a term for a portion of a song or other musical material that becomes "stuck" in a person's "head" or repeats against one's will within one's mind...Check wikipedia for more details here

The Size of Thoughts

I had/have a book by this name. By Nicholson Baker - a contemporary American novelist, whose writings focus on minute inspection of the narrator's stream of thought.

Baker is difficult to follow. Past attempts have been bouncers. But I love this phrase - the size of thoughts...

So, I decided to compile 10 Size of Thoughts Thots:-)

1. Very often, my immediate pressing work requires very small sized thoughts. Nano thoughts. Sometimes, no thoughts at all.

2. If we are satisfied with mid-sized thoughts, that's all we will ever have!

3. The company we keep, affects the size of our thoughts. Some people, organisations just shrink the size of your thoughts! Stay away from them...

4. Children have a habit of why-chaining(aisa kyun hota hai) everything! Their constant company can increase both the size and the shape of one's thoughts!

5. One person can change the size of thoughts of a country, an industry - Gandhi, Ratan Tata!

6. The more we stay with a problem, the more the size of our thoughts increase!

7. In advertising, who has the thought/ or sometimes the department of thought determines the size of thought:-)

8. Has constant blogging increased the size of my thoughts?! Decreased the size of my thoughts?

9. Do you only wonder about the size of thoughts related to work? What about the size of thoughts outside of work? For a social cause, any cause...

10. Have you noticed how News TV is squeezing the size of our thoughts?

I don't know whether it's making much sense...But I enjoyed the shape of these thots if not their size:-)

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?

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

A Legend Hangs His Boots

Friday was the official farewell of Mohammed Khan - our out-going Chairman and creative honcho. Pity, I never got to know him well/actually at all. Last couple of months, he had mostly been on leave or on baton-passing-role...

Mohammed has been involved in setting-up of some of India’s best-known creative agencies today. He was one of the co-founders of Rediffusion in 1973, came on board to start Contract in 1978 and finally in 1983, started Enterprise.

He has been involved with/ built iconic brands like Raymond, Charms, Lakme and most brands that had their origins in the 70s and 80s.

Mohammed modestly says: “Half the credit should go the clients, we had excellent relationships.” “In fact, that’s one thing that’s missing today –– agency relationships with suppliers, photographers, directors etc, which made them give that little extra. That was what made the difference between good and great.” (ET)

Most of the advertising honchos were there - Ranjan Kapur, Piyush, Prasoon, Balki, ...along with the Bates team with Sonal and Subhash!

The high-point of the evening was Tom Alter(a close friend of Mohammed) reciting Ghalib with lot of passion & feeling to a youngish crowd, who listened impatiently with little understanding of the Urdu language or the nuances of Ghalib...

Though I was a bit inebriated on Sula red wine, managed to take some pix and catch snippets of eulogising speech and random spice:-)

1. Lets start with Mohammed. A legend. He thanked three people in particular in his warm, avuncular(though have heard stories of his temper) style. Subhash Ghoshal for rehabilitating him at Contract. His client Sunny Pillai of VST industries for writing a cheque of 10 lacs that enabled him and Rajeev Aggrawal(also present at the party) to start 'Enterprise' and Raghu - a soulmate and co-worker of many years!

Mohammed also said that he had two big worries. Both of which seem to have been resolved. The first being what would he do after retirement. But then he recently saw Alyque with a smashing babe and thought that life after advertising might not be so bad after all LOL. And after Sonal taking over the creative leadership at Bates, his second worry has also been taken care of...

And his friendly poke at Ogilvy while introducing Sonal was - "Piyush, watch out your ass!!:-)"

2. Ranjan recalled the famous Khan remarks during the heydays of Enterprise- "Ogilvy is just a middle of the road agency" and "the reason that Ogilvy claps so hard at award shows is that they have little else to cheer about"!

3. The streaky haired Sonal had this to say - "Mohammad saab, aapke itne bade jootey aur hamare itne chhote pair, kam se kam hamare pairon ka size toh dekh liya hota"...

All in all a nice warm party, a sentimental send-off with a good blend of veterans from the past and the present.Tom Alter, Juhi Babbar & Rajeev RajaRanjan & MohammedSonal & Mohammed

You can read a Mohd. Khan interview at Nita's blog here...

Context is Everything

Spotted this little ad on the now ubiquitous Garbage Dumper on the streets of Bombay...

Translated it means - "Please don't litter or spread old jokes!!"
It's an ad for the show Great Indian Laughter Challenge III on Star One...

Another kick-ass 'contextual ad' was the towel I got as a freebie at the Goa Ad Fest earlier this year from Times Now. The message said - "Big or small, we cover them all":-)

One of the biggest ways to fight ad clutter in the media landscape would be to tell interesting stories in a context. The relentless pumping of advertising rupees without a context mostly irritates the consumer or is plain filtered...

Bang On, Big Bang But Very Expected!

Of course I didn't watch the Hutch(oops Vodaphone) TVCs on now the much hyped Star TV block. There are more interesting things like the Twenty20 on the tube!

Hyped as a major media innovation( although I fail to see why it's an innovation.)It's a big budget ROAD BLOCK rather than a Great Idea.

Well, finally Hutch - the country’s fourth-largest mobile service provider has changed it's identity yet again. And I think it has done it the right way. Almost too right I feel:-)

1. Retained the cute, lovable pug as well as the two animated characters (the girl and the boy)

2. Promises to retain the tagline - "Wherever you go, the network follows" especially for the network related ads.

3. “Hutch was a well-loved brand, and all the things which the customer found endearing will continue to be projected,” said Harit Nagpal, the company's marketing and new business director, on agencyfaqs.com. Well, that again is the most sensible thing to do. Indian marketers I feel are too trigger happy with change. Very often change for change sake!

4. The company insists, Vodaphone will be a more mass brand, offering value-added services, in all the existing 16 circles rather than maintaining an up-market brand imagery from it's international lineage...

5. It's among the most humongous brand name changes in Indian marketing, affecting the lives of almost 35 million customers across 400,000 shops! And looks like the client and the agency have done a great logistical job!

From the little that I have seen of the name-change, it's bang-on and correct but somewhere my expectations from Hutch( sorry Vodaphone:-) and the agency Ogilvy in particular were a bit higher...But it's still early days!

Ogilvy has a habit of surprising everyone with great advertising particularly towards the year end:-)

How far will you travel to catch my eye-ball?

Pic. The Garnier Fructis bookmarks kept at the cash counter at the Oxford-Statesman Book Store in CP, New Delhi. If only there was a nice quote(environment-relevance) or a beauty tip(category relevance), the brand effort would have been so much more meaningful.Garnier Fructis product and logo again on the Railway Reservation Chart on a AC-3 compartment at the Kurla Station!

I think, two equally annoying 360 executions!

While I like the crafted, youthful look of most of Garnier Fructis TVCs and am a medium user of its anti-wrinkle creams, found this surround sound communication quite out-of-place!

Is this what 360deg thinking has become?

Jeetey Raho

Some of the better ads on TV never get the due attention because many of us are busy debating the craft and the cleverness in our business! I have the ICICI Jeetey Raho TVC in mind...Maybe it's a little late in the day but let me finally park the whirling thoughts in the head...

Saw it 1-2 times on TV. Loved it for the following reasons.

1. The interplay between a modern day husband and wife is very nicely captured...I am tired of the old cliches that are no longer true! Ever so quickly there is a gender role shift happening in our towns and our lives...Accelerating every year!

The bread-winner, the decision maker, the influencer, the soft task and the hard task master, the dreamer and the doer are all roles which are getting re-defined, re-negotiated and re-packaged. Most TVCs once again lag LIFE!

2. Just the other day, was watching an old Sanjeev Kumar flick, where the heroine in a song sequence is touching the feet of SK. Fast forward to this defining imagery and the line 'Jeetey Raho' with the wife giving the 'token ashirvaad' to the husband.

3. Again it's hearting to see a girl child in the TVC. Looks like a nuclear family with one kid. And this time it's not Rahul or Karan or Ravi bete...
There is an underlying code in TV advertising which is mostly respected. When it's one child, show a boy, if it's two show a boy and a girl...

We mirror our society's fondness for boys...It might be a small thing in a 30sec commercial, but most of us fall prey to it. This ad doesn't and that's why I loved it!

Like with everything around us, ads with 'Batti Gul Ho Gayi', 'Hawa Nikal Gayi', 'Pant Khul Gayi' often end up being the most debated commercials with ad gurus voicing hoarse their coarse opinions, while its commercials like these which make the mark both in terms of sales and sense! May their tribe increase...

(Read Ankur Jain's nice analysis)as well!

P.S The hoarding near reclamation shot through the window pane of a moving cab on my mobile camera. Am ignoring my Nikon these days:-)

Yeh Toh Bada Toing Hai...

As I opened my mail in the morning, I find this news on agencyfaqs. The wise men of ASCI have decided that the 'Amul Macho advertisement was not so obscene as to give rise to grave or widespread offence!'

If the Amul Macho ad is not offensive then I don't know what would be offensive. The grammar, the expressions, the inane double-meaning words/ sounds like 'yeh toh bada toing hai' are all downright vulgar!

I don't think lower middle class families even in UP and Bihar(the major markets for this brand) would enjoy watching this ad either with their kids or with their parents. And almost 100% of the house-holds are still single TV...

And Pushpi's argument that the ad has been well received and the sales have jumped is besides the point. Titillation in any manner will definitely get noticed be it for an ad, a 24X7 breaking news channel or a Bollywood item number! But that's no justification for 'vulgarity' and 'distastefulness!

I guess we have a little responsibility to shape the popular culture aesthetics through the content(ads included) that we create keeping in mind the younger generation.

Yes, the ad is indeed clutter-breaking. But it's also trash-generating! The soundness of the thought ‘Amul Macho. Crafted for Fantasies’, is debatable. But there was no necessity of it being lewd!

Maybe, the wise men of ASCI don't watch TV with their families anymore. If they did, they wouldn't give it the clean chit...

The New Creative

I was having a meeting with a senior colleague of mine from the region. We were sharing notes on what constitutes the new creative!

Here's what I had to say...I guess the mashed up potatoes say it all:-)
But don't think many of the creatives in India get it...They dread the open-source, formless, digital shape of creative age that's upon us! Often they discover they can't solve the communication problem by saying - "the film opens on..."

Thot of the week - In an era of people generated content Are creatives the new suits!!

We Made Them Change

A friend of mine from Chennai mailed me this pix.

Says he - "Following the Jet-Air Sahara deal, Jet Airways went thru with a few
changes, one of them included a change in their colors - logo, uniform, etc

Last week, at many places across the city, big Jet Airways hoardings were
put up with their new punch-line, "We've changed."

Barely 36 hours later, KingFisher came up with an even bigger hoarding
declaring "We made them Change."

Seems like a war mirroring the Cola ones!"

Well, at least better than the advertising we have seen from Kingfisher till now except Yana of course...)

Beattie FCUKs Scam Ads

For the official version on the Goa Ad Fest goto agencyfaqs! For the spice and straight from the trenches feel, stay tuned!

With a weak broadband link, its increasingly difficult to upload stuff...but I shall try my best.

In the two days, Ad Fest has upstaged Abbys as the numero uno advertising awards. It's been organised like an International event. A round of applause to the AAAI. Well done guys! But for the heat it's been a spectacle.

The beach, the babes(!!!), the booze, the water sports, down to the msn bike-taxis ferrying people up and down the ad village, every thing's been well thought out.

Just came back from Trevor Beattie's one hour chat! The guy was full steam and theatre. And boy did he take the pants of scam ads!

Some quick fire Beattie bytes before I rush again for the awards...

1. "I think the world is divided into two camps - the ones who care and the ones who don't"

2. Scam ads should be called cheat ads as you cheat the clients, the consumers and most of all yourself!

3. "Let's be very clear. We don't do ART. We do COMMERCE"

4. I guess in the ad industry we all need to say something nice about someone behind their backs.

5. in my whole life I might have had just two BIG IDEAS...What we all need to take to clients are a whole bunch of small ideas that take the brand forward.

6. The great work will speak for itself...

That's all I can manage...Gotta rush to the venue!

Will Street Meet Strategy?

Was speaking to David, our regional training head in the morning. Predictably like most non-Indians he too was struck by the vibrant colour and diversity of our country.

Later, on board the flight to Delhi, came across a feature on street art in the in-flight magazine JetWings!

There is so much ingenuity in the street. Something which we must capture while we tell our brand stories. The 'Street' is far more original, colourful, messy and alive than the manufactured images in most of our ads...Picture from Jetwings : Paining on a house wall in Calcutta by the popular local artist, Ajay Kar
Picture : Paintings on the bodies of trucks
This is a really unusual cross-over of ethnic cultural motifs and practical messages. A medium which has barely been tapped into by big brands.
The format is very Indian, very street and the content 'very native Indian wisdom'!Picture : A mural at Bandra Reclamation
Any form of street art not only produces a gallery of colourful images but also provides a platform to explore regional variations.

Will commercial communication tap into street art or will we just allow homogenised electronic-age images to smoothen all our diversity into a blander, uniform landscape...

The strands of DNA

About a year back, two newspapers were launched in Mumbai - HT and DNA! Contrary to my initial expectations, DNA outsells HT by a good margin...I guess DNA Mumbai was amongst the most hi-profile and expensive media brand launches in 2006!

I regularly read(okay snack) both HT and DNA and have been following the brand trajectory rather keenly. My thots on brand DNA(triggered by their new campaign)in no particular order...

1. The Dainik Bhaskar group(which co-owns DNA) has perfected the art of launching newspapers in new markets after doing a huge consumer research...Full points to people-led-marketing . It works.I think it helped DNA get its initial lead over HT in Mumbai. The marketing efforts also looked sufficiently distinct from the leader TOI.

2. I sort of liked the voice-of-people tonality of the launch campaign. Of course, it helped that HT had a totally ambiguous 'Let there be light' launch campaign done by Ogilvy!

3. On any given day, I have always found more content(in an absolute sense) in DNA than HT.

4. But what's perhaps lacking in DNA is a POV, a sharper articulation of what brand DNA is...On the other hand, HT under Vir Sanghvi appears to me a newspaper brand with a balanced POV. Though ironically it's Mumbai launch was with the cover story on the scandalous Salman - Ash tapes:-)

5. I feel DNA should have worked more on the people-generated content/ brand landscape. A more approachable, a more conversational brand. Not just in content but also in tonality.
Clearly the current campaign - 'Start a Conversation' is a bit distant and cold for the brand as I carry it in my head as a reader...

Conversations with strangers/ anyone often start with a degree of hesitancy, a certain languidness and a general warmth over chai/coffee tonality...
Which this campaign with its stark images sorely lacks even as it hits you from massive hoardings in the city.

6. As a reader I have felt more comfortable with the design/lay-out of HT. It's smart, it has an even spread of content...Neither too text heavy. Nor too visually indulgent. Just the right amount of information for a quick but relaxing browse.

DNA on the other hand chokes me with information even though I admire its attempt to feed me more news every morning. Relative to HT its not easy on the senses. I would have loved a little more naturalness in the lay-out rather than a sense of contrived exactness. The DNA layout appears a bit FMCG-ised...

The models in the current ad campaign are like that. Cardboard picture-perfect-caricatures...Like the product, the brand communication could do better if it loses its stiffness...

I think in the case of DNA, its a case of the product leading the brand...And a change of agency from Rediffusion-DY&R to Contract hasn't helped much.

The brand needs to focus on its DNA, which to me the reader appears to be a strand of collaboration, conversation, cause and of course good content!!

The Future is Copyright:-)

Every time I have spring-cleaned my eclectic cartons of 'sundry collectibles/ scraps/ physical thot blurbs from the past, I have always discovered real gems...

Must hone it into a planning tool soon...LOL

What you see is a BPL corporate print ad made by Rediffusion DY&R from the Jan 2000 issue of the magazine The Week!

The copy reads...
Chillers of the Future!
Will your refrigerator converse and calculate calories?
Will it be made of titanium, or kryptonite?
Will it freeze air into food?
Only one thing's for sure...it will be BPL
The future is copyright BPL!

With the benefit of hind-sight and the continued stress of the myriad problems that have plagued BPL, brand BPL has been the only unsurety:-)
This print campaign was a visible one(of its time). In fact the BPL - Believe in Yourselfcampaign with Amitabh was perhaps ver1.0 of the 'India Shining/ India Poised story!

Is it available online? Possible to get that campaign? Meraj? Your agency...