Strategy advisor and essayist. Twenty-five years spent reading the forces that move India's economy: trade, geopolitics, industry, and the long game of building enterprises that last.
As I mentioned in my last post. This Flipkart advertisement manifests the problem in advertising industry & why we do not see pathbreaking advertising.
Earlier, both the client and someone like a Piyush Pandey would have known the historical & reverential context of BBD in Kolkata & trashed the ad in the concept stage before even thinking of contextualizing it to something as trivial.
Next is what Flipkart? A 26/11 Fire Sale or a Jallianwallah Bullet Proof Offer ?
Meanwhile Binoy Babu, Badal Da & Dinesh Bhai would be squirming in excruciating disgust.
The three were 22, 18 & 19 respectively when they attained martyrdom by the way.
Why aren't we seeing iconic advertising like in the past?
I blame it on commodification of creativity. Intellectual & technological commodification.
Key to creative communication that address a billion & half people in a country as large as ours is a combination of finding its common functional and emotional threads and deep functional understanding of your product & category.
Both seem to have come a cropper in the creative profession over the last decade and a half with a few exceptions.
Identifying common emotional threads of India is about knowing its demography, geography, its cultural sensitivity, its aspiration, its motivations. Creatively visualizing a communication that resonates involves deep understanding of the category, the business, the product and its functional propositions.
Most creative professionals of today seem to have a media filtered view of India from behind the screen. I find few interested in dirtying their feet on field, gaining knowledge about creation of the product or service, understanding the supply chain or meeting consumers and assessing moments of truth. They operate in a virtual cultural bubble inside their screen. Far removed from reality.
This gap is the core reason we don't see iconic advertising.
The demand for commoditised creativity is so large that it has spawned a crowd of agencies dispensing volume over quality which is accepted. They seem to be less creative agencies & more aggregators of Gen Z digital manpower who operate basic software tools.
The scenario is the same on the client side. For the marketing team an agency it is an outsourced manpower resource that is at their beck and call to produce layouts of little consequence.
A brand is a sum total of all aspects of business, communicated clearly. Even if manufacturing, pricing, supply chain, sales etc function smoothly and the creative aspect falters no brand can ever be built.
There is Canva for layout, Shutterstock for images, Claude for copy & a Runway for video.
But no tool can replace visualization.
That purely is a function of intellect, observation, interaction & sensory experience.
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