Category: Uncategorized
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There’s an idea in the soap sud
Grooming is magical. I am not talking about hygiene here. I am talking about the fantastic ability of our minds to groom its thoughts while we groom our bodies. It is as if there are switches on our bodies – on the scalp, on tooth, on the skin. As water falls/ razor shears/ tooth brushes […]
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The Advertising Agencies of future will be Open Sourced
The alternative ‘new normal’ Sir Martin Sorrell, perhaps the most powerful person in the advertising industry, recently said that the “new normal” for the global advertising industry is that of “low growth.” I think that is not necessarily true—if we examine the underlying assumptions about the source of growth for the industry. The advertising industry […]
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A capitalist industry can only be saved by a communist ideal – unions
Everyone whines about the bane of free pitches. Everyone knows that it is bad for business. It strips away dignity that should be afforded to agency’s labour. Why should any labour be free? Besides, it increases uncertainty about businesses with increasing frequency of pitches. Clients behavior is changing – it is getting conditioned to treat […]
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Honest marketing meetings
Humanity is quite immature as species. A stunning example of our intellectual frailty is the specimen inhabiting glass towers in uncomfortable suits and ties: the marketers. They are ace bullshit artists (well, of-course not you, but others 🙂 ). They can shift responsibilities of decision making as fluidly as a tai chi master might shift […]
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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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A matter of dialing ‘it’ up or down
As a strategic planner, I try to make choices clear for a marketer: for example, whether a campaign needs to talk about ‘new ingredients’, ‘benefit of new ingredients’, ‘advantage of the product’, emotional pitch for the brand and so on. Now, for a reasonable person, making that choice, though not easy, is possible. All it […]
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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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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 […]
Truth About Branding 