Tag: advertising
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“That is the creative challenge”
If clients, planners, management folks and even creative directors make a habit of envisioning their idea before talking about it, we would be spared of a lot of bullshit. So recently we presented an elegant campaign that was not ‘exciting enough’ to the client. They thrashed it mercilessly. “Its a 20 seconder, we don’t have […]
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Specific diseconomy
Win awards with scam Fight competitors with self-destructively cheap pitches Create walled gardens for petty rent seeking Delude yourself by thinking that creativity is the sole preserve of your kind Do not grow your people, nurse a few egos Advocate brave disruption to clients, but do not attempt it yourself And when someone does try […]
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Agencies as platforms – setting up for failure
Publicis is trying to become a platform with ‘Marcel’. PHD has ‘Source’ – another platform idea. Ogilvy also has its OS – more or less a similar idea. Every global agency wants to become an Operating system/ platform where it could efficiently put to use the thousands of creative minds, departments for its thousand clients […]
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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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How not to be a lazy hack
“I can’t think of a decent idea, so how about just using a celeb to sell the brand instead of an idea that can actually do the job better?” That’s just one way of being a fucking lazy hack. Don’t be that person. A lazy hack writes an unoriginal idea that doesn’t exactly solve the […]
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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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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 […]
Truth About Branding 