Category: Business of advertising
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Strategy-Wategy
What do you do when you have a shitty creative that is to the brief and a kickass creative that is absolutely useless? Imagine you need to sell a soap. Imagine that for the sales to move, “strategically”, the brand needs to say, “This soap will make your elephant like skin into a soft and […]
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Advertising is not art
Well, of-course advertising requires creativity. It is one of the most creative industries. And that is about the only thing that is common between advertising and artistic pursuits. The thing with art is – it means different thing for different people. The beauty of art is in its plurality of purposes or complete purposelessness. An […]
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The theater of freedom
In the sense that security guards at an airport are part of the ‘security theater‘ – for e.g., the guard mechanically moving a beeping baton across your crotch for explosives might not actually reduce the risk of a terrorist attack as much it makes people feel secure that someone is doing something to reduce the […]
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Account planner as a disinfectant of spurious notions and confusions
A role in three acts At a day-to-day level, advertising is quite a messy business. Let me illustrate. Act one A business (our client) might need something to change (perception, no of people knowing their brand, no of people buying their brand, frequency of purchases… whatever). Unfortunately, the business itself is not sentient and cannot communicate. […]
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Account planning as role playing
Account planning is no rocket science It is no rocket science in the sense that it is not complicated. There is no certification required like the ones that doctors do, nor does a planner need to have specialised narrow ‘expertise’ like an actual rocket scientist might need. A role of a planner is rather that […]
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Advertising as an amoral tongue on rent
The amoral tounge In my earlier years of advertising, I was fairly uneasy with the thought of working in advertising on moral grounds. There is a sense of lack of control over the truth about what we are talking about on behalf of the brand. In a sense, advertising is just a rented tongue for […]
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Fight for your tomorrow
A generation working against its own interest It’s been 7 years since I entered the world of advertising. It’s been longer than that with the attempt to understand world and power – by reading Chomsky, Ambedkar, Amartya Sen and so on. As you can imagine (if you have read these people that is), there was […]
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Future of ideas
An idea is. and we are its vehicles. (see the ted talk below) We are the replicants at the employ of ideas. An idea does its best to spread no matter what we want to do with it. Tomorrow it will find a better replicant than us in machines. And right now, it is rewarding […]
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Advertising as parasitic meme
I. Agent to parasites Orchids fool bees into carrying their pollen by making the bee think that it is getting laid. Advertising works in a somewhat similar fashion. The difference is; instead of genes, it is in the business of propagating memes*. Advertisers needs agencies because, intrinsically, most commercial memes are not interesting enough. Deep […]
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“Moment of Truth”
Sometimes, weird vowel-less sounds (?) stumble out of busyfolks’ mouth. When they utter these sounds among themselves, there is an implicit expectation that the meaning is understood. Its amazing really, a fence made of sounds. Recently, I was confronted with this particular sound -“FMOT”. It took me a while to hear sideways and decipher the […]
Truth About Branding 