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Nithya Subramanian

The days of boring matter-of-fact advertising on television seem to be over. With the economy picking up, companies are once again liberal in allocating budgets. Global alignments are an added impetus.

Prasoon Joshi's visits to various North Indian households where he was asked to choose between a Thanda or a Garam beverage, led to the idea of Thanda Matlab Coca-Cola.

The concept of talking about technology minus the jargon resulted in the dog-following-boy Hutch ad.

The quest among creative bigwigs is to be different. The days of boring matter-of-fact advertising seem to be over, thanks to the wins at various international advertising festivals including the ones at Cannes.

And so, it's not just the public service commercials that are attracting attention, even ads for staid categories such as telecom services and paints are getting innovative.

But ads showing Aamir Khan in various get-ups — as a Jat from Punjab trying to vibe with kudis (pretty young women), a Pahadi tourist guide and a gregarious Babu Moshai in the now famous Coke ads have been extremely popular. "Wah Sunil Babu" and his neighbour's "Badhiya Hai" (very nice) have become part of the North Indian lingo, as also the memorable pug trailing a cute little boy all over the place indicating that the Hutch network will follow you wherever you go.

The little sardar kid playing around with a toy Maruti car — Petrol Khatam Hi Nahin Honda (The petrol never finishes) and the Air Tel `Express yourself' commercial encouraging people to talk, are just a few of the ads that manage to remain in the mind long after the10 or the 30-seconders vanish from the small screen.

It's been a good year for the advertising industry. The Rs 8,000-crore market has, after two years of flattish growth, finally witnessed an 8-10 per cent growth. And once again creativity takes precedence over just boring strategy, a point that has the unanimous backing of ad folk. "Creativity in India is definitely on the up though it is never possible to predict what will happen at Cannes," says Piyush Pandey, Executive Chairman and Creative Head of Ogilvy & Mather (O&M).

Prasoon Joshi, National Creative Director, McCann-Erickson, says clients have started demanding good creatives. They want to break away from the clutter. And therefore, there are a lot more creative campaigns happening these days. Even those staid advertisers are jazzing up their act."

Another factor that has led to this is that the days of tight purse strings seem to be coming to an end. With the economy picking up, companies are once again liberal in allocating budgets. A third factor is that of global alignments. "Because of global alignments, there is pressure on Indian agencies to produce outstanding work. Leo Burnett India for instance, which won the global agency of the year award in its network and creativity, was one of the parameters. So, instead of the strategy-led advertising that was happening in the last few years, the focus is on emotional-connect," says Sanjay Bhutiani, Head of Leo Entertainment.

While the mix of emotion and humour seem to be the key ingredients in successful commercials, big celebrities did not really seem to cause any ripples. This year, television viewers must have seen a record number of ads featuring celebrities — both cricketers as well as film personalities have worked overtime during the World Cup cricket matches and the subsequent festival season. But none of these ads featuring a Sachin Tendulkar, Shah Rukh Khan or Amitabh Bachchan have managed to become memorable. But while celebrity driven campaigns have been unable to strike a chord, if one looks at the commercials that have done well in terms of striking a chord with the audiences, the competition seems to be between the creative teams headed by O&M's Pandey and McCann-Erickson's Joshi.

While the Coke ads have been McCann-Erickson's creation, O&M has a clutch of good commercials including Asian Paints and Hutch. Advertising executives say that Piyush Pandey's forte has been to effectively use emotion and humour in the campaigns — something that has percolated down to his team of creative directors. Coke's achievement, on the other hand, has been to use a theme such as Thanda Matlab Coca-Cola and extend it across various regions of the country. Quiz either of the two creative directors on creative rivalry and you'll be disappointed. "I do not see any rivalry. This is over-hyped," says Joshi.

"To continue to call Prasoon Joshi my protégé is perhaps a bit demeaning for him as he is a Creative Director in his own right. Also, it makes me feel a bit old. He continues to do good work and I am sure he will only get better with time," says Pandey.

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