‘2022 for most agencies’

Long weekend over. 3rd of Jan dawned. The first working day of the new year. Like a sprig of light. Illusion of warmth. Steaming mouths. Dank alcohol vapour. Big smiles invade office. Genuine wishes. Warm shake hands. Puddles of conversation. Minds alert. Like a fire station. Client call jangles the air. As usual. Faraway fingers type out orders. Factory gets cranked. Templates get packed. With brand guk. They are dispatched. Quickly. The earnest sauce of sincerity.

Retaliation is immediate. Brand diva doesn’t like your copy. Hammer away smith. Bash out a few more. In lines or blocks. With colour or without. Designer moans. Art director groans. Curses follow. They trot off to infest fleas upon some grandfather’s dog. Back on the floor, keyboards clickety clack. Fonts get pulled out by their serifs. Squealing. Jammed into little spaces. Multiple options. Servicing loads content into their emails. Or whatsapps. The sun is still cold outside. Foggy. Many cigarettes get cauterised.

Lunch is fast approaching. So is that 2 pm meeting. When client stomachs are full. The rest unfed and angry. Zoom gets pressed into service. Black rectangles. One way chatter. Some bark. Some whine. The CDs at the client side are on overdrive. We hate the blue. Is this a headline? Why isn’t someone thinking? Why are we paying you? This is drivel. Of course. There was no brief. There never was. The CMO is pissed. His brand elves have crammed, much like this paragraph, 347 benefits into a tiny ad. Or a post. Or a 6 sec film. Or a gif. Or gosh, even a sticker. All he wanted was something only he knows.

There is murmur. Pushback. There are protests. Till the brand queen offers the dove of peace. Can we move this to that and bring that instead of this and put a blue line under the red line so people in Nagpur will notice. Aha. Genius. Nodding heads. Daisies in a meadow. Finally, a direction. Easy goal. Can we have this EOD? It’s only 5. Click. Crushed souls. Get back to work. The agency head finds his voice. Tearing nonexistent hair. We continue to work without briefs. Ouch. We shouldn’t. We shouldn’t. A chorus of echoes. Swiggy arrives with food. Er, late lunch now. Or early dinner. Pop.

One new email from the client. Where is the script on ice cream pictures? Gasp. That copywriter is missing in action. He went to get his pooch brushed. Now we got to lie. It will be sent by EOD again. No one is free. One bright intern gets an idea. Let’s get the nearby cab drivers to take finger vanilla stained thumbs up selfies. Thumbies. We shoot five reels. Client sees them at 6:08 pm. Call comes pronto. Idea is good. But won’t work. Thumbies is a Tam word for brothers. Or a Mal word for dragonflies. Not pan Indian. Do it again Sam. Want it tonight. Argh! So goes the first day. Into the night. Only to be repeated the next day. And the next. Till year end. Welcome to advertising. Or whatever soufflé it is now. Circular but.