Creative people like Piyush Pandey are worth their weight in gold for a reason, observed Prahlad Kakkar – what separates them from the rest is the ability to think and dream in multiple languages. At a time when ‘gora’ and English copywriters would dominate the scene, people like Pandey changed the game and Indian advertising, noted the veteran ad filmmaker and founder of Genesis Film Productions, delivering the second annual Brand Sutra lecture in Mumbai on 21st April 2023.
While such creative leaders could speak to clients in English to discuss ideas, they dreamt and delivered the idea in the language of the consumer, underlined Kakkar. He cited the example of Cadbury Dairy Milk’s cricket film that was recreated 20 years later with a gender reversal and still strikes a chord.
Kya Swad Hai Zindagi Mein
#GoodLuckGirls (2021)
In a well-attended open air event at Free Press House, the ad man opened up on the production house he ran, ads he wished he had made, and showcased work from Google and Facebook directed by Amit Sharma, among others.
Delighting the audience with anecdotes, Kakkar spoke from the heart on storytelling then, and now.
The Tribe of Story ‘Tellers’
“If you’re dead pan when you tell a story, and don’t live the story, you miss out on half the story. I love the analogy of little children sitting around a campfire and one guy telling them the story of the Mahabharat or Ramayan. He plays every single role. He’s playing Hanuman, Sita, Ram Lakshman, Ravan, every single role. I’ve seen it happening – all the kids look up at him with big, googly eyes believing every character that he takes on because his body language changes, his voice changes. And great storytellers are great story ‘tellers’. It’s not necessary that they are great story writers.
“Though the story remains the same, though the content is about storytelling, the fact is the way you present the content depends a lot on the technology.
“Even in my time when there was very basic and rudimentary technology, I refused to have anything to do with it and did everything on camera. People like me who are relatively averse to technology, I find that I have to depend on my sons or other young people to actually execute what I want them to do. It would be much easier to do it oneself, for which one needs to be ahead of the learning curve in technology. I’ve also found that in our business, anybody who is 40-plus is averse to learning technology faster than it can actually progress. The only people who can keep pace are the people who are born with the technology. To people who were born with a cell phone and computer, you don’t have to teach them anything. It’s a language that they have learnt.”
Pepsi ‘Aha’
Maggi ‘It’s Different’
A Culture of Creativity
“People would ask how you hire people when you have a 350 sq ft office of which 150 sq ft was the kitchen. There was no place to sit, so everyone sat on desks. There were more landline phones than there were seating areas. So everyone sat on the desks and speak on two phones at a time. It was bedlam. There was no such thing as a cabin. What it did for youngsters, especially, is it made them focus to such an extent on what they were supposed to be doing that they could cut out the ambient sound. Because if you got distracted by everyone yelling and screaming into the phone and at each other, then you never got your job done. To add to it, there was this huge doberman in the office. He had a designation – he was the collector of our outstanding payments. He took a salary home and took the lift with everyone else. He was from a line known as crotch dogs – he would identify people not by their faces but by the smell of their crotch. He would go straight for the crotch. Most women would get tickled by it but most men would become sumo wrestlers (the only people who train from a young age to be able to suck their testicles up).
“Dumbbell was a clever dog. He was taught that if he took a soggy envelope, put his two paws on the accountant’s desk, dropped the envelope, and breathe heavily into his face, he would get a biscuit or be thrown a ball. If Dumbbell got neither, he would start barking. The accountant would be petrified because most accountants don’t know dogs – they don’t know when a dog is barking playfully or barking angrily. The envelope had a note that said, ‘Please pay the bearer of this note the sum of XYZ outstanding. P.S.: He does not understand ‘Come back tomorrow’. P.P.S.: He does not understand, ‘The cheque is in the mail’. Dumbbell would be waiting for his ball while the accountant thought he was waiting for the cheque. We would get the cheque pronto. It happened a lot of times before Dumbbell became popular.
The ‘Holiday’ at JWT
“We did a lot of work with JWT (Wunderman Thompson) in Delhi. We did a film for them and there was a small outstanding of about Rs.1.5 lakh. It was a Levers (HUL) payment and they had conveniently forgotten to bill the client. We knew that it was outstanding and we had written to them multiple times. One say they got back and said, ‘Stop bothering us. We will pay you in a month and a half’. We were overjoyed. We planned what to do with the money because we had already written it off. We decided that the whole office and the dog would go to Goa. It was the monsoons and we were getting a great deal from the Taj Village for four days of fun, frolic and general mayhem. We told everyone that the office will be shut for four days. The day came but there was no cheque. And we were hanging around the office in the rains.
“Our office was 350 sq ft, JWT’s was 10,000 sq ft. So if we can’t go to Goa, we decided to go to JWT. They have a lot of space for all (14) of us including the dog. Dumbbell couldn’t take the lift so he had to take the stairs up seven floors.
“We had made 50 copies of the note on outstanding payment that said it would be cleared by a certain date. We started distributing it to everyone in the office, irrespective of who they were. Then we went to the conference room. They were the first agency that bought a VHS player. We started watching a whole lot of films and ordering from their canteen. We told them they could deduct it from the bill. We said we would come for 10 days and they could deduct Rs.10,000 per day. And during lunch hour, we will challenge you to a basketball match on your terrace.
“A young Malayali girl on the team Sophie and Dumbbell were a pair. Sophie took Dumbbell’s ball and id it somewhere in the art department. She told Dumbbell to find the ball. And Dumbbell sniffed every single crotch on the way. There was pandemonium. The manager at JWT ran up from the second floor and saw us huddled in the conference room. He screamed asking, ‘Who is the owner of this company?’ Everybody was deadpan and pointed to the dog – it wasn’t rehearsed, I promise you. We left and said we’ll be back the next day. But the next day, before we could even open our office, there was a peon from JWT waiting with the cheque.
“That’s how the office was. It was a creative, freewheeling office. Anybody who volunteered to cook for the day, became the boss during lunch. Anybody who got to the office on time got to decide what to eat for lunch. People think it was a lot of fun and games. It was.”
