3. The third seismic shift will be the rise of new categories of products and services. Who would have imagined twenty years ago that automobiles will become such a big advertised category in the 2000s? And who would have imagined in 2000 that telecom and mobile will be such a money spinner for ad agencies and media companies in the 2010s. In 2015, we are seeing the rise of e-commerce; while experts expect this party to end in a year or two, we may be in for a much longer ride on the e-commerce bandwagon. There are several other categories that are yet to get the power of advertising fully behind them. Areas like healthcare and education are waiting to unleash the power of advertising.
4. In the coming twenty years, what we call advertising may undergo dramatic change. Nowhere in the world has the consumer’s media cost been as badly subsidized by advertising. Indian newspapers are among the cheapest in the world. Indian cable and satellite television is again among the cheapest. All due to the ubiquitious presence of advertising. In the coming years, we will see brands entering the narrative not just in what we call ‘advertising’ but also into the editorial text. This could be in the form of product placement in films and television programmes or even brand integration into the storyline of films. All this will drive up advertising costs, with an added benefit of better targeting metrics.
5. The media landscape and the advertisers who dominate these spaces in India will undergo major transformation. For instance, someone from Europe or USA visiting India in the early ’80s may have wondered why industrial products and heavy-duty equipment were advertised in daily newspapers. But as we moved to the 2000s, those categories have all but disappeared into technical journals and digital/direct media. Classified advertising, which was a big money spinner, is a pale shadow of itself, thanks to the growth of digital media offerings. However, print and television today occupy roughly equal spends at about 45 per cent each, and this has been steady for over a decade. During the 2020s, this media landscape will change with increasing literacy. This in turn will drive Indian language print, digitization of television which will create niche opportunities, and the Internet boom which will get further enhanced by the dominance of the mobile, 3G, 4G and more. Similarly, the increased urbanization and destruction of urban and rural community facilities will lead to the continued growth of the shopping mall as the new village square and that will also offer new avenues for advertisers. The categories that advertise in these media will also change, just as they changed during the last three decades.
6. Global pundits speak of digital revolution and technology enabled marketing. All the global award shows are full of such wonders; an armband that calls out to a child that runs far from its mother, an app that you can run with, a staircase with an embedded piano keyboard and such like. In India, we will see all that, but given our craze for movies, I predict the blossoming of millions of small film-makers. They will be able to exploit the downward cost spiral of making movies. In a reverse logic, all of them will be open to partnering with brands to create content that will be of use to consumers and brands. Imagine a series of 100 films on child nutrition, or fifty films on different hairstyles; I suspect many of them are already out there and a million more will follow. As smartphones become the screen for consuming media, we will see the uptake of these videos boom.
7. Leading from the above point is the other key issue that will face brands in the coming decade. The rise of advertising costs. From the days of one television channel that could reach the whole of India in the late ’80s, today all channels put together reach only a fraction of television-owning homes. However, the pie has dramatically grown. In this decade, almost all 250 to 280 million homes will have television. So reaching all of them will cost an astronomical amount. Help will be at hand with media channels offering ways of segmenting the market and reaching only those big or nano segments you want to reach for a fraction of the cost. This ability to deploy media into smaller and smaller segments will help numerous new Indian brands to enter the world of advertising. If the ’80s saw Nirma, the ’90s saw Paras and Emami, the 2020 will see hundred such new companies bloom all over India.
8. The use of advertising by brands and services will undergo a change and I would expect a stronger social narrative coming into brand presentations. This is a global trend but it is catching on in India rather fast. If we dial back, we saw how the national integration campaigns and films played a role in building a sense of national unity. The song ‘Mile sur mera tumhara’ continues to echo in many minds.
As far back as 1952, the Indian Cancer Society used advertising to spread the cause of testing. In the late ’70s, they ran a very successful print campaign that presented ‘Life after Cancer – It is worth living’.
Lifebuoy’s ‘Help a Child Reach 5’ has been a globally-recognized campaign that espouses the cause of handwashing. The Gundappa film by Lowe has not only won awards, it has also moved millions of mothers to ensure that their wards wash their hands before eating.
The silent National Anthem film by Mudra has shown how even the deaf can sing the national anthem in their own unique way.
Times of India’s Lead India and Teach India initiatives have had such a strong public following that they have become annual phenomena.
In a first, Ulka’s campaign for the Bangladesh relief fund raiser was the Campaign of the Year Award winner in the year 1973, probably the only time a public service campaign was awarded this high honour.
HTA’s campaign for Tata Steel, ‘We also make steel’ presented the human side of entreprise that would have made management gurus like Peter Drucker proud.
If you were under the impression that the government never gets good advertising from Indian agencies, you should be informed that HTA’s campaign for Indian Army won the Campaign of the Year Award in 1998.
9. The coming decade will see brands adopting a more humane approach to advertising. In a parallel move, we should see the government adopting an aggressive advertising posture to get its citizens to change their ways. The BJP government that came to power in 2014 used high-power advertising and the Modi government is no slacker when it comes to using catchy slogans and campaigns. With the socialist halo fast disappearing, the government will emerge in the 2020s as the biggest advertiser, using advertising for all kinds of purposes, from refusing gas subsidy to paying taxes to opening bank accounts to buying health insurance.
10. With the emergence of consumption culture, Indian consumers will come out of their shell to buy and spend more. Encouraged by advertising, we will see a quicker onset of product obsolescence. From the days when a car was used for ten years, we are already seeing cars being traded in every five years or less. Mobile phones too are facing rapid recycling. The same is true with other household durables. Unfortunately, the emergence of the potlatch culture will also be a part of the modern Indian reality. Bigger and bigger weddings, bigger and bigger expenditures on weddings and birthdays are going to be a part of modern India. This will lead to a bigger set of problems.
As India becomes a consumer economy, driven by advertising, the large section that is unable to participate in this largesse is going to adopt various types of behaviour, some not so savoury. Childhood undernutrition was once identified with poor women giving their babies highly diluted baby foods whose ads they saw on television instead of giving them mother’s milk. This incidentally led to the total ban of television advertising of all types of baby and weaning foods. Will the coming era of consumption also create such monsters? The drive towards higher education may devalue technical skills and trade skills leading to imbalances in the job market. The fast-fashion culture could lead to unnecessary expenditure by the poor on fashion goods that they can least afford. One element of Indian society may prove to be a saviour and that is the trickle-down system that has been in vogue for centuries. In the past, it used to be clothes and utensils. Now it has become television sets, mobile phones and even two wheelers. Tomorrow it will be laptops and more.
Our journey has tak
en us through how advertising has looked at society through numerous lenses; presentation of women, men, kids, senior citizens, marriage, jobs, education, teenagers. We have also looked at how various products and services have shown society, be it cars, mobiles, foods, sports, dresses etc.
We saw how depiction of habits, rituals and roles have changed. In some of the cases, advertising merely reflected society as it is. In some cases, advertising predicted a social norm. And in some cases, advertising harked back to a forgotten custom.
Advertising’s role will have to evolve with the times. How can we reflect societal trends? How can we ride the social media boom?
Should advertising be a predictor of societal trends or should we stay one-step behind? Should we stick to the ‘hyper-ritualization’ routine or should we embrace a ‘neo-ritualization’ trend?
As India changes, its advertising will also change and become a force multiplier. That is the power of advertising. And that is what advertising can achieve. These questions and more will keep advertising men and women awake at night. And that is not entirely a bad thing.
Acknowledgements
I GOT INTO advertising thanks to Ajit Balakrishnan and Subhas Chakravarty of Rediffusion, and I left after three years for a ten-year stint in marketing and sales. I returned to advertising, thanks to the invitation from Anil Kapoor who had taken over as the CEO of an ailing Ulka Advertising. Over the thirty-five-plus years I have spent in advertising and marketing, I was fortunate to work with truly passionate people and I owe a deep debt of gratitude to them for having tolerated me and also for educating me on the finer aspects of advertising and marketing communication.
When I floated the idea of the book with Anish Chandy, my literary agent, he did not hesitate for an instant to say ‘yes’. And over the course of the last twelve months, we have met several times, discussed chapters and topics over calls and emails. He is the first to pull me back when I digress into the realm of academia. He is also to be blamed if you found too many personal anecdotes from my life in advertising.
I owe a special debt of gratitude to many experts who were generous with their time. Gerson da Cunha, the grand old wizard, called me home and spent over two hours telling me tales about the wonderful old days of advertising. Many others such as Professor Arvind Rajagopal, Subhas Chakravarty, Satyam Viswanathan, Arun Kale, Anvar Ali Khan, Vikram Doctor were kind enough to share their thoughts. The final draft was reviewed by Suman Srivatsava, Savita Mathai, Kinjal Medh, Sharon Picardo and Dorab Sopariwala. A special thanks to them for their valuable comments. Industry experts who have taken the time to write books about their views on consumers and advertising, namely Subroto Sengupta, Piyush Pandey, Alyque Padamsee, AG Krishnamurthy, Ramesh Narayan, Anand Halve, Jayanta Sengupta, Rama Bijapurkar, Ramanujam Sridhar, RV Rajan, Dheeraj Sinha, Santosh Desai et al were always present within arms-length for consultation as I started writing the book. I also reached out to numerous industry captains for their approval to use images from their campaigns. Every single one of them gave me their enthusiastic nod and these include Ashok Kurien, Goutam Rakshit, Mukul Upadayay, Madhukar Kamath, Madhukar Sabnavis, Tarun Rai, Prasoon Joshi, Joe George, Dhunji Wadia, Piyush Pandey, Rahul DaCunha, Alok Nanda, Sanjay Behl et al. Special thanks to all of them.
Pan Macmillan India has been a very supportive publisher. Pranav Kumar Singh, who started with us on this journey, Rajdeep Mukherjee and, later, Diya Kar Hazra, who has been forthright with her views on many aspects of the book, have had a very important role in shaping this book. If you found the book easier to read it is thanks to Diya’s efforts. The copy editor on the book, Sushmita Chatterjee, has done an awesome job in going through the text in meticulous detail, spotting errors that had missed my eyes. The cover design by Samia Singh is a showstopper. Special thanks to Ratna Joshi and Peter Modoli for their work in marketing the book.
Finally, my wife Nithya has been extremely supportive of my literary excursions. She is subjected to go through the first draft and in return she is ruthlessly critical in her views. I am notoriously bad at rewriting. But she got me to rewrite many of the chapters. So if you enjoyed the book, you know whom else to thank.
My colleagues at FCB Ulka, the place I called home for the last twenty-seven years have tolerated me and supported me right through all my writing adventures. All my past senior colleagues, Anil Kapoor, Nagesh Alai, Shashi Sinha, Arvind Wable and Niteen Bhagwat, have been silent supporters. They and many of our colleagues, film-maker partners and clients feature in the book. My past assistants, Jensy George, Mincy Fernandes and Amrita Keny, and the superb FCB Ulka production team under Hemant Ranadive have been a big help as well.
This book is a result of what I have learnt from my many colleagues, partners and clients. If you found it of value, the credit goes to them. The faults are entirely my own.
Notes
Introduction: Divining Societal Trends Using Advertising
1. J Lears, Fables of Abundance: A Cultural History of Advertising in America (New York: Basic Books, 1994).
2. N Mehta, Behind a Billion Screens: What Television Tells Us about Modern India (New Delhi: HarperCollins, 2015).
SECTION ONE
The [In] Complete Man
1. N Mehta, Behind a Billion Screens: What Television Tells Us about Modern India (New Delhi: HarperCollins, 2015).
2. C Moog, Are They Selling Her Lips? Advertising and Identity (New York: William Morrow and Company, 1990).
3. McKinsey & Company, ed., Reimagining India: Unlocking the Potential of Asia’s Next Superpower (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2013).
4. ‘Man Mood 2014’, Cogito Journal, Cogito Consulting, vol. 21, 2014.
5. R Bijapurkar, A Never-Before World: Tracking the Evolution of Consumer India (New Delhi: Penguin Books India, 2013).
I am a Complan Girl! I am a Complan Boy!
1. See under ‘Our Commitments’: ‘Responsible Marketing & Advertising to Children’, International Food & Beverage Alliance, 2015, https://ifballiance.org/our-commitments/responsible-marketing-advertising-to-children/
2. JU McNeal, Kids as Customers – A Handbook of Marketing to Children (New York: Lexington Books, 1992).
The Tingling Freshness of Teens
1. A Padamsee, A Double Life: My Exciting Years in Theatre and Advertising (New Delhi: Penguin Books India, 1999).
2. Isabel Ortiz and Matthew Cummins, ‘When the Global Crisis and Youth Bulge Collide: Double the Jobs Trouble for Youth’, United Nations Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF), New York, February 2012, http://www.unicef.org/socialpolicy/files/Global_Crisis_and_Youth_Bulge_-_FINAL.pdf
3. M Gladwell, Blink: The Power of Thinking without Thinking (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2005).
4. R Bijapurkar, We Are Like That Only: Understanding the Logic of Consumer India (New Delhi: Penguin Books India, 2007).
5. D Sinha, Consumer India: Inside the Indian Mind and Wallet (New Delhi: Times Group Books, 2011).
6. R Titus, Yuva India: Consumption and Lifestyle Choices of a Young India (New Delhi: Random House India, 2015).
Jo Biwi Se Kare Pyaar...
1. R Dwyer, Picture Abhi Baaki Hai: Bollywood as a Guide to Modern India (Gurgaon: Hachette India, 2014).
2. SC Dube, Indian Society (New Delhi: National Book Trust, 1990).
3. See Census of India, http://www.censusindia.gov.in/and http://censusindia.gov.in/Census_And_You/age_structure_and_marital_status.aspx
4. ‘The Parenting Group and Edelman Partner To Provide Insights on The Modern Dad at the First Dad 2.0 Summit’, Edelman, 8 March 2012, http://www.edelman.com/news/the-parenting-group-and-edelman-partner-to-provide-insights-on-the-modern-dad-at-the-first-dad-2-0-summit-82-percent-of-men-who-became-a-parent-in-the-past-two-years-feel-there-is-a-societal-bias-ag-2/
5. P Underhill, What Woman Want:The Science of Female Shopping (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011).
Ab Main Bilkul Boodha Hoon, Goli Khake Jeeta Hoon!
1. S Kakar and K Kakar, The
Indians: Portrait of a People (New Delhi: Penguin Books India, 2007).
2. P Chamikutty, ‘A Country for Old Men and Women, Anybody?’, The Economic Times, 8 August 2012, http://epaper.timesofindia.com/Repository/getFiles.asp?Style=OliveXLib:LowLevelEntityToPrint_ETNEW&Type=text/html&Locale=english-skin-custom&Path=ETM/2012/08/08&ID=Ar03100
3. R Edgley, ‘The Rise of Viagra Abuse: Doctors Warn against Worrying ‘Sextasy’ Trend - Where Ecstasy Is Mixed with Drug to Enhance Euphoria’, Mail Online, 13 February 2014, http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-2558502/The-rise-Viagra-abuse-Doctors-warn-against-worrying-sextacy-trend-ecstasy-mixed-drug-enhance-euphoria.html
4. ‘Riding the Wave’, The Economist, 27 June 2015, http://www.economist.com/news/business/21656190-worlds-enthusiasm-cruising-lifting-europes-shipbuilders-riding-wave
5. ‘Over 60 and Overlooked’, The Economist, 8 August 2002, http://www.economist.com/node/1270771
Twacha Se Meri Umar Ka Pata Hi Nahi Chalta
1. AG Krishnamurthy, The Invisible CEO: My Mudra Years Including AGKspeak (New Delhi: Tata McGraw Hill, 2005).
2. A Padamsee, A Double Life: My Exciting Years in Theatre and Advertising (New Delhi: Penguin Books India, 1999).
3. E Goffman, Gender Advertisements (New York: Harper & Row, 1976).
4. McKinsey & Company, ed., Reimagining India: Unlocking the Potential of Asia’s Next Superpower (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2013).
5. R Bijapurkar, A Never-Before World: Tracking the Evolution of Consumer India (New Delhi: Penguin Books India, 2013).
6. ‘Woman Mood I’, Cogito Journal, Cogito Consulting, vol. 22, 2015.
7. Centre for Social Research Report, ‘In Search of a Suitable Girl’, India Today, 6 April 2015.
8. howindialives.com, ‘Young Wives, Young Mothers’, Livemint, 18 March 2015, http://www.livemint.com/Politics/HW6UN51zR85FWM3oGwdBRM/Young-wives-young-mothers.html
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