Don’t Forget 2004 – Advertising secrets of an impossible election victory

Some of India’s greatest stories, real and mythical, are about the triumph of the underdog. Cricket, cinema, and our pre-independent history have inspirational stories of unimaginable victories which have been captured, told, and retold through the generations.

These incredibly riveting narratives help strengthen the belief that it is not the size of the dog in the fight but the size of the fight in the dog that matters more.

Modern politics is surprisingly underrepresented in this pantheon. Politics, unlike cricket or cinema, is not about passive viewership by consumers, but of active participation by most of India’s adult citizens. Yet outside news archives and some books penned by journalists, we have very few stories from this sphere of our lives woven into our social fabric and certainly no great story of an ‘upset’ victory that captured our collective imagination because of the unexpected outcome.

Jayshree Sundar’s thrilling and entertaining book “Don’t Forget 2004-Advertising secrets of an impossible election victory” is a worthy attempt at filling this gap.

We have a lot of excellent brand studies that draw causality between brand insight and idea and consumer behaviour, but the pickings are very thin when it comes to connecting brand insight and idea with citizens exercising their choice at the ballot box.

Jayshree has been distilling this story to maturity through the format of a case study that she has been teaching over the last decade or so to her MBA students. 

This true story retold as a marketing case study is now available as a fast-paced unputdownable story.

It starts with the morning of January 6^th when the agency receives a call to present its ideas at an eight-agency pitch presentation. This is when the BJP’s ‘India Shining’ campaign had been in play for four months already. The story is written in a diary format with days and timelines and the progression of events right until May 18^th when the new government was formed.

Most advertising case studies books tend to focus on the creative and showcase advertisements. This book focusses on how strategy is developed and then translated to creative output. It demonstrates being true to your plan and taking care to communicate the same messages all through the plan.

Jayshree gives us a ringside seat into how two organisations (Congress and Leo Burnett Delhi) work in complete synchronicity led by two remarkable leaders who quietly assert their authority while giving their core teams the freedom to create a compelling counter-narrative to BJP’s ‘India Shining’ campaign.

The book objectively captures the genesis of the pitch for the account, the many hoops the agency had to go through to ultimately emerge winners (another underdog story within an underdog story!), the behind-the-scenes action and the decision making as the idea is pitched to the core Congress brains trust (Salman Khurshid and Jairam Ramesh, and other senior Congress leaders) in a series of meetings and finally to Sonia Gandhi.

This 5-month saga post Leo Burnett winning the pitch captures how the agency hit the bullseye on the pulse of the people, chisels the insights into two brilliant ideas - the rhetorical ‘Aam Aadmi Ko Kya Mila?’ and ‘Congress Ka haath Aam Aadmi Ke Saath’.

Despite knowing the outcome of the election, there are many moments when you are on the edge of your seat -- has the opposition infiltrated the agency firewall? Have the phones been compromised? Will the idea be diluted as it progresses from one meeting to another? Will people deep into rural India get any exposure if budgets are cut? At these crucial junctures, a hero emerges either from the agency side or the Congress’ side to shepherd the nascent idea through a perilous situation. Thankfully, no external force nor internal doubts could stop an idea whose time had come.

Given the recent election victory in Punjab by the Aam Aadmi party, one can only help wonder what if the Congress had not just treated the brilliant revolutionary idea developed by Leo Burnett Delhi as a 2004 campaign idea, but instead had the foresight to look far ahead and had embraced the idea of Congress being “government of, by and for the Aam Admi” to transform the party into a 21^st century political force,we might have been looking at a different scenario today.

(Ajai Jhala practices natural farming in Saurashtra at Wild Jai Farm. He was previously CEO of BBDO India and Global Communications Director at Lowe-Lintas Worldwide based in London. )  

About the Book

Don’t Forget 2004 – Advertising secrets of an impossible election victory.

Jayshree M Sundar

Vitasta

Rs 495; 284 pages

Check out the book on Amazon

COMMENT NOW