|
Magazine
Peddling dreams in tough times
|
Indian advertising is at a difficult intersection. Though armed with a marvellous technology, it often overlooks content. The form thus assumes meaningless importance, and sometimes communication suffers, writes GAUTAMAN BHASKARAN.
|
AFP
The sky's the limit... but use technique incorrectly and it can blind a viewer with inaneness.
AN advertisement is a medium. It carries a message from a manufacturer or service provider to a customer. We all know that. But what we do not know, or care to, is that the medium often becomes the message. And the message, well, the message that the medium wanted to convey in the first place, is lost in a bewildering variety of frills.
Indian advertising, despite its slick, smart strides over the past few years, has not been able to get rid of its bagful of tricks that is clever by half.
There are so many, many advertisements which are wide off the mark. A rum company presents a calendar full of skin-clad women. A car manufacturer has a movie actor and actress to push its product on the fast lane.
In these cases, the companies and advertising agencies do not seem to pause and ponder whether their places of labour achieve what they are meant to. Will a guy looking at the models on the calendar remember the brand of liquor they had hoped to promote?
Will a star-struck fan care to pay attention to the contraption the celebrities were trying to peddle?
The malaise in Indian advertising runs deeper than this. Often, technique is used not as complement but to the detriment of a commercial. Have you seen the increasing number of advertisements that rely on sheer gimmicks, such as fast-cuts and freeze frames?
Technique is a helpful ally, but lean a little too heavily on computer graphics and other catch gizmos, they blind a viewer with inaneness. Form must never be allowed to lead and cloud content. An advertisement can become soulless, and ultimately, a useless piece of film or paper. What an utter waste of creativity and cash that would be!
One of the people in the world of medium and message, Ashish Bhasin, President of Initiative Media in Mumbai, agrees with this impediment called technology. "There is one area that needs attention: much of our advertisement moves on execution rather than idea. Over the years, our production values have gone up. But have our concepts grown sharper?"
One has to do a lot more here, because "technique can never substitute an idea. It can aid an idea. It can prop up one. The moment an advertisement is all sound and no stuff, all colour and no content, then it will not work. It is like writing a bad book, and printing it beautifully on art paper", Bhasin adds.
An advertisement of this sort is often created with an eye on winning an award at Cannes or London, and, obviously, it loses sight of why it has been conceived at all: to build brands and to sell goods and services.
Meenakshi Madhvani, CEO-India and Regional Director-Asia Pacific of Carat Media Services in Mumbai, underlines another block in Indian advertising. The use of women, who are hawking anything from Ayurvedic medicines to automobiles, from latches to laptops. "A woman in an advertisement may, at best, arrest your attention for the moment, but she can do nothing beyond that, because sex does not ultimately help sell anything. In fact, nothing remains in the mind of a reader or viewer, because he fails to connect the `figure' to the message."
This is a classic case of taking the easy way out. Not peculiar to the advertising industry, though. "This is to do with us as a nation, as a people. We are becoming victims of the quick and the casual kind of solutions. We do not want to get to the root of an issue. We are a generation of `Band Aid' specialists," says a ruthlessly frank Madhvani.
The brickbats never seem to cease. As I hear out another bigwig in the field, Goutam Rakshit, Managing Director of Advertising Avenues in Mumbai, some more warts and moles pop up. "Advertising is increasingly identifying a number of pulses, and playing on them, hoping to meet the desired outcome. But, eventually, this can provoke a backlash from viewers and readers, who may realise sooner or later that they are being manipulated. A good example of this is a communication which indicates that white skin is better than black skin".
Advertisements are also "diluting the standards of acceptable human behaviour: bullying is being projected as normal. Look at the way a detergent firm shows children purposefully staining someone else's clothes and telling him/ her that your mother better have the washing powder to clean the marks. On the surface, this may appear innocuous, but watch the television images critically, and you will understand what I am trying to tell you," Rakshit explains.
Then, there is another bear that bugs this world of icons and idols, jest and jingles. Honesty. Sam Balsara, Chairman and Managing Director of Madison Communications of Mumbai, tells me that I have touched a "raw nerve" in him when I asked him about advertisements and truth. "Advertising has to be honest. This is the only way it will work. Clients and agencies understand this. We have the Advertising Standards Council of India to ensure that each piece of writing or frame of cinema or television is truthful, decent, safe, legal and fair to competition." Yet, "the advertising fraternity has not been able to check or contain some small agencies operating in the smaller cities and towns. They are essentially fly-by-night operators."
What about the established advertising agencies? Do they always follow the correct path?
AFP
The message must not be gobbled up by the medium.
Balsara evades these questions, but talks about developments which could have "forced" some to be unethical. "The general economic downturn, which in India began much before the September 2001 tragedy, put pressure on the advertising industry, whose growth rate plummeted from around 20 per cent to under 10 per cent. Although newer categories — writing instruments, computer education, automobiles and insurance — emerged, they did not grow as one would have liked them to. Most of the larger agencies learnt to cope with this slowdown, and did not stray, but the smaller ones did."
Such sluggishness also resulted in the rise of "stock market-led managing directors, whose major focus has been the quarterly balance-sheets. Given this environment, where sales teams are pushed into performing with an eye on short-term gains, there is a temptation to tread the wrong path."
Here is an illustration. Some agencies and clients were seduced into "pushing brands to the backseat, and products to the front. This often destroys a brand. A good manifestation of this is the promotional offers that come along with fast moving consumer items. Purchases are dictated by freebies, and not necessarily by the strength of the brands themselves. A cake of soap with a gold coin becomes more attractive than one without the metal," Balsara regrets.
This practice goes against the very grain of advertising, whose primary motive or objective is to build and sustain a brand. Companies aid and abet here, blinded as they are by the dazzle of quick returns.
So, how does one check this? Expand your market. Look towards villages, leaders of the advertising community advise. Ranjan Kapur, Executive Chairman of Ogilvy and Mather India in Mumbai, rues that "our advertising is still very urban centric, because the top 28 metros and mini metros buy and use 80 per cent of all goods and services. The 635,000 villages are ignored, at least largely."
This means that many among the approximately 300 millions people (after deducting some 300 million who exist below the poverty line, and after assuming that most of them live away from cities and towns) in the countryside remain beyond the reach of the manufacturing and service industry, though not necessarily outside the circle of communication.
With about 50,000 newspapers and magazines, nearly 300 radio stations, and about 200 active television channels reaching out to men, women and children in farflung areas of India, someone in a hamlet in Maharashtra gets to see the same advertisement as someone else in New Delhi. So, a villager is aware of premium brands, has a desire, and often the means, to possess them.
However, he does not always get them. Blame distribution for this or lack of concern, but the fact is that the organised sector is hardly interested in investing time and money outside urban agglomerations. For three reasons. The rural market is still untested, and highly dependent on variables such as monsoon. It is not easy to transport material to the interior regions.
Yet, there is little choice now. Business can get no further in the saturated metros and mini metros. The trick now is to strengthen and expand the supply network by roping in small shopkeepers in villages and towns, and with already an aspiration there, selling even a dream may not be very difficult.
M.K. Khanna, Area Director-Central Asia of J. Walter Thompson in Mumbai, feels that the advertising community is ready to take this challenge head on. "Indian advertising is mature enough to address the country's diversity. Advertisements now connect better with consumers. They speak the people's language. Advertising is no longer elitist. It cannot afford to be, because the buying classes are not the rich alone."
Indeed, flick through the pages of a newspaper and magazine or watch television commercials, advertisements no longer confine themselves to the "South Bombay English Dialect". They break into Hindi, Tamil, Gujarati or Kannada ... .
There is a certain welcome Indianness that has crept into advertising, which has, after many years, realised that communication must communicate — and effectively — to a Jat farmer in Haryana as it must to an English professor in a top college.
Perhaps, this is the most important role that Indian advertising will have to play in the days to come. It has to carry the sandesha from the maker or provider to the buyer. It has to create an awareness, a yearning.
Says Anil Kapoor, Managing Director and CEO of FCS-Ulka Advertising in Mumbai, "now with socialising truly behind us, advertisements will not be accused of invoking unwanted desires in us."
What a relief, for "I think advertising is the engine that drives production, productivity and progress", Kapoor sounds optimistic. Undoubtedly so. Advertisement is one of the instruments which can help an economy grow — by working up an appetite, which leads to buying, and which then feeds industry.
If, on the way, an advertisement humours us, entertains us, the outcome can only be happy. But, the message must not be gobbled up by the medium. What a vain work-out that would be.
Printer friendly
page
Send this article to Friends by
E-Mail
Magazine
|
