The Hindu Business Line : A fine madness

Satyajit Ray, Shyam Benegal, Muzaffar Ali, Saeed Mirza — these film-makers all worked in advertising at some point in their lives. It is interesting that they chose this profession in their earlier days; maybe because in this profession people do learn something useful.

These, then, are musings on what advertising can teach people. First, because advertising is about people, you have to learn about what makes human beings who they are, wherever they may be and whoever they may be. While advertising may create hyperboles of human existence, making light of life and sometimes parodying it, the substance of it comes from common, everyday stories and insights into commonplace existence. (In any event, this is where the most profound truths about the human condition exist.) Those who work in this business learn very fast about people. They have to if they want to succeed as brand handlers, planners or as creators. And in a country like India which abounds with the most amazing variety of languages and cultures, colours and hues, tastes and smells, sights and delights, willy-nilly those who are in advertising become immersed in the everyday life of this great country. Advertising teaches you how to create portraits of people; for it is one thing to know people and quite another to be able to describe them. Great advertising people develop photographic memories and create snapshots of the lives and times of the people they come across. Advertising gives you an eidetic sense of the world.

Advertising also teaches you discipline in communication. It is true to say the best communicators are those who are brief, to the point and clear in their purpose. Saeed Mirza, now recent author of a fascinating paean to his mother, worked in advertising for some years. He said advertising taught him how to be brief in both words and visuals. “We sometimes tend to embellish our own argument with too much decoration. You cannot do that in a 30-second commercial.” He is grateful to advertising for having giving him that discipline to make better movies and write better screenplays. With economy of words and visuals, he also learnt the virtues of fiscal economy!

Those who are at the business end of the advertising profession learn invaluable lessons as well. As people who are interested outsiders in their clients’ businesses, they get an objective overview of the way organisations function. And because there are a large variety of organisations they have to deal with, they get panoramic perspectives on business issues, business problems and their solutions. It is not surprising that very often product ideas and strategic solutions come from advertising agencies. It is, therefore, even less surprising that clients sometimes tend to hire the very people who work for their advertising agencies. Some of them have gone to big success in marketing and service organisations. But advertising is not just a halfway safe-house for frustrated journalists, authors, film makers or would-be CEOs of global companies. For those who choose to remain in it, there is a virtuous cycle of reward and enrichment between the profession itself and the people who work in it. Advertising teaches you to be interested in life!

Kamlesh Pandey, an old friend of mine and an erstwhile colleague, once said to me that you have to be ‘encyclopaedic’ to be in this business. As he put it, you never know where the idea is going to come from. So you have to be interested in everything: music, architecture, technology, religion, movies, fashion, style and trends, travel, reading, children, relationships, food, anything and everything … advertising asks that you be interested in all of life! Here is one of the few professions in which you cannot stop learning. So each day can be an adventure, each day a new exploration. I always tell young people who join or want to join advertising that if they want to learn this business they should travel: travel in India and travel by trains and buses. They will meet the most amazing beings on the planet. If they do so, these human beings will tell them the most amazing stories about their lives and the lives they see around them. Advertising is all about telling stories. We learn to be better storytellers.

I ask people who work in advertising to be interested in mythology — not just the Ramayana, the Mahabharata, the Puranas or the Panchatantra but also the various mythologies of the world. To read of the Vikings, the Teutons, the Romans and the Greeks, the Assyrians and the Sumerians and the Hittites, of the Bedouins and the Tuaregs, Phoenicians and Egyptians, the Benin, the Aztecs, Incas and Mayans, the Sioux, Chippewa, and Hopi Native American tribes, the Bali mask dancers, the Maoris and Polynesians and of the Dreamtime and Song-lines of the Aboriginals and the legends of the Shamans, the great story tellers of the Siberians steppes, is reward enough. Because it is in these and many other stories that we also recognise our own. And when we relate them to contemporary urban legends and modern folk tales of India and elsewhere, we create great, potent and persuasive communication. Which other profession wants you to be involved in the never-ending graphic novel called Life?

This, then, is what advertising is about. It allows you to learn. Advertising at its very heart is a very personal obsession. You do not find cookie-cutter people in this business. Nobody is the same as the other. And forgiving the tattoos, ponytails, bleached and blond hair, shaved heads and earrings of this motley crew that we call advertising people, you will find individual stories and personal passion working together in teams with no uniform and no common colours. We have a saying in advertising which asks of newcomers, “Bring yourself to the party.” I do not believe that there are many professions that allow you to do that. It is also a profession that allows you to expand yourself as a human being. People like Gerson DaCunha, who does such amazing work for the Bombay First initiative. He is a former advertising man. Alyque Padamsee, I suspect, would call himself more than a theatre person. He would be proud to say that he was an advertising person first and foremost. These luminaries also taught me as well as others the great techniques of theatre and presentation.

Advertising also teaches you be a better communicator of ideas. I talked recently with Muzaffar Ali, film director, music impresario, fashion designer and a wonderful man who wears his nobility as easily as he wears his beautiful clothes. He told me that his most precious learning from the time he worked in this business was Confidence. (Methinks he capitalised confidence!) He said in advertising, you learn to achieve the impossible, pitching thoughts and ideas to reach creative solutions with improbable timelines and resources. He added, “You realise that the human mind is not impregnable. You realise that there are techniques of reaching people at the right time and place in the right way so that you can motivate them and persuade them of an idea, an ideology, or a vision. I use that confidence and those techniques in my work today.”

When you look at famous people who are still in advertising you get a profound appreciation of how interesting they are as persons. Take the case of Piyush Pandey. A Rajasthani tea taster and tea planter, former Ranji trophy cricketer, client servicing executive (who had the amazing wisdom to turn down an account management job offer I once made to him), Hindi writer and possible poet who loves folk music, theatre, movies, travelling and food and, of course, women: Piyush Pandey is one of the most interesting people I know because Piyush is interested in life and because Piyush is in advertising. At the end of the day advertising people are the hardest-working people you may find. Nobody really works as hard and sometimes with so little money, unless they are truly interested and passionate about the business they are in. Advertising rewards you every single day with new challenges, new insights, new ideas, and new excitement. It sometimes feels like you are getting a smorgasbord of delights on your table and a never-ending thali of amazing taste and flavours and you get to choose and you get to pick. Advertising people also play after working hard, because those who truly enjoy what they do also know how to celebrate.

Advertising, finally is the business of potential and possibility. The business that allows you to expand your horizons to see beyond where you are to what you might become.

(The writer is Chairman, Saatchi & Saatchi India, creator of the Abby and founder-member of the Goafest.)