There was a missed call on my mobile when I woke up this morning. Chhimi Dorji had called from Phuntsholing in Bhutan. Chhimi and I first met way back in 1991.
He owned Bhutan Board Products Limited, a company that manufactured medium density fiber (MDF) board in Bhutan and marketed it in India. He hired us as his agency. I travelled to Thimphu at least 30 times over the next decade to service his account.
Together, we created a market leader in MDF out of Bhutan, and Chhimi went on to pioneer the launch of DIY furniture in India 25 years ahead of Ikea.
But why had Chhimi called? Oh, he was going to be in Kolkata and Delhi in the days ahead and wanted to check if we would be in the same geography on any of those dates and the possibility of catching up. Chhimi is long retired. But he still keeps in touch. We have no business to transact. Thirty years after we first met, we are just friends. Very good friends.
CAMARADERIE OF YORE
What was so special about Chhimi Dorji as a client? Well, most importantly, he respected the intellect and expertise of the agency. He gave us the space, and the freedom to do our best by him.
He encouraged us to be our best on his brand – celebrating new and innovative ideas, experimenting with cut-through creatives and participating actively in long strategy sessions that were needed for his never-before product range.
In 1992, or maybe 1993, my creative partner Gullu Sen suggested a campaign using look-alikes of Laurel and Hardy to communicate that the assembly of DIY furniture had been completely idiot-proofed by Bhutan Board, and that anyone, but anyone, could assemble the furniture at home without any prior knowledge or expertise.
Chhimi bought the campaign without even batting an eyelid. The commercials turned out fantastic. Further, I suggested that we run the campaign on the then just-launched only English satellite channel, Star TV – which perhaps only 0.001% of Indians were watching at that time – but these very 0.001% early adopters were, in any case, the bull’s eye target customers for the new-fangled furniture.
Chhimi didn’t even think twice: he just went with our recommendations. Bhutan Board furniture captured the market in no time, with a long (and heartening) waiting list. Unfortunately, clients like Chhimi Dorji are very rare these days. The trust, the esteem, the respect, the friendship, the camaraderie has sadly gone missing.
WHAT A LOSS OF STATURE
With Rediffusion, I have returned to mainline advertising after almost a decade. The one big change that I have seen over the 10 years that I have been away is that at most client offices today, the ultimate arbiter of the client-agency relationship now is no longer the CMO, but instead, the head of procurement and purchase.
In the past 10 years, more than ever before, the advertising business has been robbed of its stature, its access to top management and its celebrated position as the torch-bearers of the brand’s equity. Sure, line-by-line cost controls and optimization are necessary; so also are quantified results in terms of campaign deliveries but never do I ever see an RFP that says that the agency will be entitled to a whopping bonus if the campaign becomes “famous, part of the language and part of the culture of the people”. I will explain that soon.
When I was running the Colgate account 20 years ago, I recommended the title sponsorship of the then untested and yet-to-be-aired Kaun Banega Crorepati (KBC) to the client. KBC even allowed us to shoot a commercial on the sets of the game show. KBC went on to become a roaring success. Colgate gained exponentially from riding the incredible KBC wave. And they were ecstatic. Rediffusion went on to collect an unheard of Rs 1 crore bonus!
ADS ETCHED IN MEMORY
The moot question, however, is that whether agencies are today even capable of producing what Diwan Arun Nanda, Founder & Chairman of Rediffusion, wrote as the vision of his new agency in 1973: “We will create advertising that becomes famous, part of the language and part of the culture of the people”?
What resulted were campaigns like The Zing Thing for Gold Spot, Hum Red & White Peene Walon Ki Baat Hi Kuchh Aur Hai for Red & White, Express Yourself for Airtel and Laga Daala To Life Jhingalala for Tata Sky, and many, many more that remain etched in consumer memory despite the passage of years and years.
My honest answer to the above question, by the way, is a simple ‘no’. Sure, India had a record awards haul at Cannes this year. But how many consumers had ever seen the Titanium-winning campaign? How many would recall it unaided?
Even 50 years after it was created, Rin’s lightning strike or Garden’s swirling women in sarees are fresh in consumers’ minds. Why? Because the agencies had the freedom to create the very best – without discussions focused only on retainer amounts, resources deployed on the account and quantified deliverables. The clients (or at least most of them) today do get efficient advertising. But not effective advertising. Or winning advertising.
CALLING OUT CLIENTS
Worse still, the retainer system itself is getting consistently misinterpreted (more like misused), and is enslaving the ad agency business – subjugating it to the whims of clients as has never happened before. Not all clients are guilty of this misdemeanour, though. But one client actually insisted to me recently that we create social media posts free for his brand because he said “not all guys on your team are fully occupied all day”.
There were more similar and equally inane demands. I didn’t know if he was really serious. But he was. I tried reasoning with him, but to no avail. More for our own self-esteem than anything else, I resigned the business – it brought in a crore a year, no mean amount. Many of our peers would have swallowed their pride and succumbed. But at my ripe old age, I thought, an ad agency too should also have the freedom of choice: to dump an ill-behaved, thankless client.
What say?
(Dr Sandeep Goyal is Managing Director of Rediffusion. Views expressed in the column are entirely personal.)
