Prathap P Suthan, National Creative Director, Grey Worldwide

Today most youngsters want to do a poster, a mailer, a small book or a logo which will help them win an award. They have nothing to do with the brand, it's outside the jurisdiction of the brand, but they would do everything else for which they have not been hired for. That's a problem, and not just with us, it's a cancer that's going across the country. Unfortunately, a lot of good people who do good work on brands that gave them their bread and butter became disillusioned.

Prathap P Suthan, the National Creative Director of Grey Worldwide, wasn't very sure where he was headed after he passed out of Loyola School, Thiruvananthapuram in 1977. But much like the Harrison song "... if you don't know where you're going, any road will take you there...", he seemed to have landed at the right place. While working on a set of Christmas posters for a friend's hotel, he stumbled on his life,s direction - the conquest of words.

Suthan began as a copywriter with Reflections in Thiruvananthapuram. A few months down the line, and after several brochures, he left advertising to move to Philadelphia where he tried to 'unsuccessfully' pick up the craft of retailing coir carpets. Back in India, he joined Mudra, Ahmedabad as part of India's first Copy Training Programme. He has worked on brands such Vimal, Rasna, Dhara and Ajanta Clocks, among others. He also represented Mudra at the DDB Worldwide Creative Directors' Conference at Monte Carlo. In June 1995, Suthan joined Mudra, Kolkata and a year later he joined Trikaya Grey in Kolkata, later moving to Delhi. In 2004 he was elevated to the position of National Creative Director.

He has worked on campaigns such as India Shining and Incredible India, which was the first ever Euro Effie won by an Indian agency.

In a freewheeling and candid interview with exchange4media's Tuhina Anand, Suthan talks about his journey as an adman, creative versus effective advertising, and the ads that work the best.

Q. What, according to you, is effective advertising?

Effective advertising is what delivers in the market, because that is why someone spends money. If you do an ad and it leads to selling 10,000 more of that product, to me that is effective advertising. Whether that advertising tickles somebody or wins an award is not the issue, the issue is for the money that the client has spent was the objective of the advertising been met and how effectively was it met. Ultimately, if you take everything away, that's the core of advertising, which is about generating sales. The more and more me-too your products and services get the more you start doing tangential advertising. Today, everybody knows an XY phone versus an ABC phone, but if you take the brand name away from the phone, will it still work the same? It's only the add-ons that make a change, it is more for one's ego. Brand advertising belongs to the heart rather than appealing to consumers' mindspace. The awards that we got this year were for 'effective advertising', something that has worked for the client, as was proved in the case of the Incredible India campaign.

That's the thing! Not every well made film wins applause from the critic, sometimes real pictures or advertising is not noticed, why? Effective advertising is not the finest pieces of creative, sometime crass pictures are noticed too. If you look at the Incredible India, is it the finest we could have done from a creative point of view? Definitely not. I mean you could take this to any non-coherent level, but that then beats the purpose of advertising for the country. This is mainstream advertising and you don't want to give it a wild flavour. You've got to be very careful what you run because you are looking at bringing a large number of people to the fold.

I do have a style when I write. I have grown enough to insulate myself if I want to write about beauty, I would write the way a woman sees beauty, or if it's tourism, I would write the way a tourist would want to read it. It is about word play, the right word gives the write stimulation. A true copywriter would have 100 personalities within himself and he would shift that with ease such as writing like a 10-year old kid, a teenager selling candy or an injured 25-year old man. I am a little philosophical; I am an honest writer and write about feelings and emotions.

To test an ad, take to few people and if they say what a fantastic ad, then throw that ad and rework. But if they say what a fantastic product, that's a good ad. That's how I see my advertising. I come from a different school of thought, I want to do work that works. I believe in getting into the soul before getting into the cosmetics. Like a doctor first needs to save life before getting into plastic surgery. That's why you are hired, a skill to convince to shift the preference of people to a particular product. You are not talking to a person, but a huge society which is so complicated. I don't understand what's in other's lunchbox, that's how different we are as a country, yet I have to address all of them.

It's a very divergent question, a difficult one. In our profession, unfortunately you don't have any other measure, hence, awards do matter to find and evaluate an agency's creative potential. If a film is good, it gets an Oscar. The person acting in it is regarded as a great actor. How else would you evaluate his acting ability? I guess that's why in advertising you have different awards and that's a way of splitting creative advertising versus effective advertising. That's why Effies have come up because at some point of time the awards veered away from what it was supposed to do or what it actually meant.

There are people who talk about advertising and then 'Artvertising', where advertising has become an art form. Would some of those ideas which won at famous advertising events actually deliver at the sales level? I doubt. From an idea point of view you should also look at from judges who evaluate these ads, people like us, who are in the creative business or in the advertising creative business. I am of the opinion that everybody is creative else you don't have a reason to live. Your broker is very creative because that's how he makes money off you. Your driver is very creative because that's how he cheats you of Rs 200 he claims to have put as gas and provides a bill for that. So, everyone is creative, we are just advertising creative, though in the social hierarchy we come after the plumber and that's a fact because a plumber in our society is far more important than an advertising professional!

The reason why a client is spending money is not to win awards for his campaign, I can guarantee you that. A client would say that he is spending money so that his market share increases. However, at the end if you win awards, that's fantastic.

Certainly, who else is bothered about it? Clients do read about the fact that your ads won, they like the idea that you are a greatly awarded agency, but beyond that they are not concerned. Go back to the time when Grey used to be the most awarded agency, did we get businesses? I think at that point of time we lost a lot of businesses, because we concentrated a lot on award winning advertising rather than market winning advertising. It's important for the client but not as important as the agency. I can say this in writing that if you delivered a Lion or a Titanium on a client, but if that client lost 10 per cent of the market share that year, you are sacked.

On the other hand, even if you win zero awards but delivered more than 10 per cent on the market share the client will be happy with you and willing to spend on the agency. That 10 per cent will build the fortune of the agency, that's how it works. But if my boss asks have you won a Lion or a Clio, I have that to show. All said and done we are all hungry for awards and the day is not far when we win the big one, because if we can win all these, that day will also come. Everybody wrote us off, but we reached where we have reached and reached well, because of certain commitments and certain passion. So, now to me the momentum is clearly there and there is no stopping us anyway. Are we enthusiastic about winning awards? Of course we are. Do we have enough people to do that? Yes, but we could do with a few more.

Today most youngsters want to do a poster, a mailer, a small book or a logo which will help them win an award. They have nothing to do with the brand, it's outside the jurisdiction of the brand, but they would do everything else for which they have not been hired for. That's a problem, and not just with us, it's a cancer that's going across the country. Unfortunately, a lot of good people who do good work on brands that gave them their bread and butter became disillusioned, for some people it's not there to win awards or they don't have that extra spark to do a quirky ad on a brand that doesn't exist. On the one hand, you have a youngster who won an award and suddenly he gets noticed as 'the creative person'. On the other hand, there is a person who has spent all his life on building brands and the client is happy, but realises that he is in the wrong business as the brand he has worked upon has done well, but he is not recognised as the creative talent.

It definitely inspires you to do good work next year, and if you take it positively and that's the way I look at it - when you get an award you think that yes, I have something definitely working for me, it gives a positive charge and pushes me to produce real work. So, it's a continuing cycle, if you get it regularly you get pushed into doing good work, on the other hand, if you missed it you are gone because our culture is like that. It's an unreal culture anyway. As it is said, we are in the business of vanity and that's a fact.

It's the most mortal profession after the armed forces. People have all sorts of ailments be it BP, cholesterol, etc., and that's a fact. With technology has also come the devil called the client who thinks we can deliver stuff overnight. Earlier, there was a physical process of getting an ad, it was analogue and not digital. First you got an idea, you had to find the picture, you had to choose the layout, font book, take it under the light, get the headline, write the copy on typewriter. The sheet would then be sent to the typesetter and the entire process would take almost two days. Today you can do all of this in 10 minutes.

This year has been perhaps the 'most awarded' year of Grey. Both Mumbai and Delhi offices won several awards, but the big thing is that we have won big time in mainline and mainstream advertising, and not scam advertising that one keeps hearing about. We have more of legitimate awards today and I would say that our harvest of awards are much better than most of the agencies. We also won an Euro Effie this year and we are the first Indian agency, perhaps also the first Asian agency, to have won that award. And we didn't win this by fluke. I have always talked about my commitment to effective advertising. To me, this is a testimony or tribute to that, the thinking that the agency has.

This year we have won about 68 awards till now and sure there are more to go. We are definitely on our way up. That's not bad at all.

I wouldn't call them scam ads because they are in poor taste. Because if you stop awarding these so called scam ads, you will only award work that's happened in mainstream advertising, then you have the right to say that please don't enter scam ads. However, on the other hand, you would say that look we accept everything, but these look like scam ads, but we will award them, you have no right to say such things. Then you should be very clear that these are ads that have never run and are to be disqualified.

Cult advertising is missing today. The craft of writing good body copies is disappearing. Because of the focus on TV, very few people are left who can write well. We are leaving compelling writing to novelists, which used to be one of our strong points. Youngsters have lost the talent to write and you can't blame them, that's the way the environment is. That, I believe, is an issue to raise the bar of creative.

Every year there is a mood swing and a new idea that rules. Internationally, there is a concept of 'New Page', where you have to create a page which no one has created before. The interactive medium is a collaboration of all the mediums - print, visual and audio. Today, billboards have become 3-D, and you are reaching a point where television is giving you a feel of smell and perhaps taste is also not too far away. It is about imagination and imagination drives technology. There is a lot of cross-over from media to media happening today and with mobile content, the screen is becoming smaller and a new community is emerging. We need to understand them so that we deliver what appeals them.

It is a business of fragile egos. I think we live in an artificial world because we jump from one psyche to another, so we are also wondering who the hell we are. We take false support and that's detrimental.