The Hindu Business Line : Commercialising creativity

Having their say.. A file picture of Manoj Kohli, Chief Executive Officer and Joint MD, Bharti Airtel, at the launch of Airtel’s DTH service. — Kamal Narang

Agnello Dias

Everyone has something to say!” Those were the exact words I screamed out 18 years ago in the bathroom of a small advertising agency in Ballard Estate, Mumbai. As I looked at the face staring back at me in the mirror, I couldn’t for the life of me see why anyone called this business ‘creativity’ at all. I was six months into the job and already itching to call it quits because of the non-stop interference in my ‘creativity’ by everyone f rom the client’s niece to the media planner’s brother. Then one fine day, I repeated my rant in the middle of a studio — surrounded by grizzly, battle-scarred troopers who’d seen many an advertising tyke spontaneously combust in that room — and kept repeating again and again, “Everybody has something to say!”

In the pause that followed, the oldest grizzly in the room, without so much as lifting his head, said something that opened my mind forever. “If nobody had anything to say, we wouldn’t be here, would we?” With that sentence, the simplest, most erudite definition of commercial creativity unfolded before my disbelieving eyes.

Commercial creativity has always been a bit of an enigma for most. And just as it frustrates the logical mind, I suspect there are an equal number of people out there who prefer it that way. Creativity, to my mind, mysterious and irrational as it may seem, has some pretty simple logic behind it. And what I have kind of gathered in 18 years of practicing this wildly unpredictable form of making a living is here for all to accept or assail.

All creativity to my mind starts with someone, somewhere, at some point, having something to say. Said normally, in one of the practised languages, it’s called communication. Said differently, in one of the not so commonly practised languages however, it becomes creativity. It’s like this. Creativity, like communication, has many languages. Just like there is English, Hindi, Spanish, Mandarin and the like, there is also painting, sculpture, literature, drama, photography and music. All of these have their own dogmas, rules and grammatical regulations. And just like some phrases, some turns of speech, some jokes can best be told in some languages, similarly some conceptual thoughts and ideas can best be projected in particular creative languages alone. No amount of writing can capture the magnificence of Michelangelo’s ceiling. And even the great Michelangelo himself would admit he couldn’t put down Beethoven’s Sixth in any form of pigment or material. The same diktats apply to the real life world of communication. A Bengali turn of phrase is hardly going to retain its magic in German and a Milton sonnet is most likely going to get butchered in chaste Tamil. So while on the one hand there is conceptual thinking, on the other hand there is also mastery of the language in which that conceptual thought ought to be communicated.

However, there are instances in history when minds with the most original conceptual ideas also happen to power the most skilled practitioners of the language in which those thoughts can best be expressed. That is when we have what the world calls a genius. But geniuses, in case you have noticed, also happen to be a minority. So what happens to the rest of us? Well, the ones who still have something to say but are unable to master one of the creative languages do the only thing a rational mind can think of.

We buy the services of someone who does know one of the languages. Or go to a place where several practitioners of different creative languages can be found under one roof; most often an advertising agency. Enter commercial art — the jingle composer, the copywriter, the illustrator, the studio photographer, the commercial artist, the bust sculptor. All of them are highly skilled at one of the creative languages and they are willing to offer their services to those who aren’t. Now most clients pay and need agencies for their craftsmen. But few, if at all, see value in and make use of an agency’s thinkers. But I have been lucky to run into a few such.

Only recently, I worked on a brief from Airtel for their direct to home (DTH) television service — a parity category with the only differentiator being content. Not being the first mover in the category, we had no choice but to keep honing in to content. Soon, we realised that content was going to be an ever changing race and it would be impractical to peg the communication strategy on content. As I sat back late at night in the JWT Delhi guest house, absentmindedly flipping channels trying to wrestle and grapple with this digital TV thing in my head, I got so bored that I just kept my finger on the channel flip button as I was too lazy to press it over and over again. For the next three minutes I had a runaway express train of visuals, images, words, voices and genres that literally cut a rampant swathe through a cross section of India as it stands today. From yoga sessions to Baywatch to Masai warriors to WWF to Bollywood stars to soap reruns to classical dancers to sports to music… it was a breathless sprint through everything that India loves watching. So I thought (and this came absolutely out of the blue), what if the simple act of rapid channel surfing was given a life and form in the real world.

What if all the genres of television entertainment came outside the TV set together and faced us side by side? What an incredible bhel puri of entertainment that would be! It’s something that we see and experience every day on TV, but if it were to happen in real life and the real world, it would be a sight to leave us stunned. So I wrote the story of a man coming home to the airport, tired after a long flight, only to be received by every genre of television channel there exists and being escorted home by the entertainment icons of his dreams.

It was the oldest trick in the book; when you have a point of engagement in your product, show it loud, big and clear. And through this single piece of celluloid storytelling, the brand had had its say. As usual, everyone had something to say. We all do. It’s the one thing that makes us human!

(The writer is Chief Creative Officer of JWT India.)

This edited version of the article is printed courtesy The Smart Manager - www.thesmartmanager.com