Santosh Desai, President, McCann Erickson

If you recognise the value of creative then you should also understand that there are some conditions that are conducive to making a truly outstanding creative, and part of the condition is the encouragement and the fact that clients whom you tell a great idea instantly respond to it. They should be able to say yes or no from their heart. More and more clients are beginning to do that. But then it requires time – sometimes resources and sometimes just an open mind.

Santosh Desai, President, McCann Erickson, India does not mince his words when he talks about the advertising industry in general or McCann Erickson in particular. Pitfalls or praise, he takes it all with élan knowing for sure that the agency is headed in the right direction.

Desai, an IIM-Ahmedabad alumnus, is also a prolific writer apart from being seen and heard at various platforms. In conversation with exchange4media’s Tuhina Anand, Desai talks of McCann Erickson, making of a memorable ad, client perceptions, and more.

Q. Could you name two issues that the advertising industry needs to take a look at today?

One issue is how do we get respect? How do we get an automatic and inevitable respect from the client? To me that is something that is of concern. I think it stems from the fact that I believe we don’t deserve respect. We don’t make investments in answering questions as thoroughly and honestly as we should. We deal in cliché and superficiality. The industry is fundamentally responsible for this. Everything is tied to this one question.

The other issue is perhaps that of talent. How do we view talent, nurture and recognise them? We have to work towards creating an environment that requires the talent to blossom. I think the question of recognising and working with talent is a critical issue. To nurture talent people have to believe in who we are and have a sense of belonging. No human being belongs to a growth rate of 13 per cent. We have to respect an individual’s ability and create an environment to push it towards delivering high quality of work.

Delhi office for the last few years has been doing extremely well, including all our brands, be it Dabur, Nestle or Perfetti, among others. Some of the most celebrated work is out of Delhi. So, if you look at the overall equation for Delhi, it’s a pretty good time for Delhi.

Delhi is a market where the whole idea of buzz doesn’t exist. It’s curious that the notion of marketing community exists in Mumbai, which is a very strong idea having a sense of community. There is a sense of network, which finds testimony in news traveling very fast from one agency to another. To some extent this idea also exists in Bangalore, though not as strong as in Mumbai.

Delhi is almost like island and there is no sense of community and no sense of network. When there is an occasion then also people don’t attend. The awards in Delhi are a joke. What is buzz? It is something that travels fast from one place to another. The idea of buzz doesn’t exist. Till 4-5 years back when someone used to ask me about Delhi versus Mumbai, I was one of the staunch defenders of Delhi because of the large Delhi market and always thought that the Delhi-Mumbai issue was overrated. I am forced to admit that it is not the case today. In terms of overall availability of creative talent at the senior level I think it’s Mumbai that rules. The creative engine tends to lie much more in Mumbai than in Delhi. Even when you do have news, somehow it doesn’t become a big event and does not move beyond its designated quarters.

I think Delhi has been too concerned with business. Profit and loss accounts are known to your company, the outside world celebrates the creative work. In advertising, given the nature of the business, increasingly it’s the quality of work that gets you more work. Traditional strong agencies were creatively weak, but that has changed today as the strong agencies need to be creatively strong as well. Delhi has had a strong business orientation, but in terms of quality of work, the investment required to nurture the talent needed to maintain quality of work has been lower.

When you like doing something it comes naturally. For me talking to someone on the phone and those opinions appearing somewhere is not a function of what I do, but a function of what they do. Writing is something I enjoy and 90 per cent of my writing is not on advertising, it’s something I enjoy.

It’s to set sights high. Your expectations from advertising must go beyond and not merely be seen in terms of what it will do for awareness and reduce it to numbers. If you want to make your advertising to have an impact on the lives of people in every possible way set yourself those standards so that you are open to ideas and you push the agency towards such ideas that have scale. Get into partnerships with the right people by trusting your instincts. It’s the notion of collaboration, it’s not as much a client-agency relationship as it is a co-collaborator on the brand. And there are clients who are actually doing this.

I don’t know. That would depend upon what the industry thinks of McCann. We don’t ask ourselves vis-à-vis competition where do we stand. Our interest is that what we believe is right. We are, therefore, not marketing ourselves. The work we want to do is rooted in deep understanding of the consumer. Even outside work people come to us when dealing with topics such as changing India and society because that’s the kind of work we have invested in. The work we want to do should be judged by the degree by which it lives in the lives of people. This means, if people utter ‘doobara mat poochana’ when they do something in their lives, it is a reward which is worth much more than many awards.

Why not? Creative names 10 years ago were known within the industry, but were not known to the marketing world. Today marketing people respect creative names and talents and that is why creative talents are such big names in terms of public perception. And clients acknowledge that fact. Yes, they are cynical, and clients need to be cynical about this. But I think there are more and more clients who are recognising the value of creative. I think the gap is in recognising the value of creative and taking the next step. If you recognise the value of creative then you should also understand that there are some conditions that are conducive to making a truly outstanding creative, and part of the condition is the encouragement and the fact that clients whom you tell a great idea instantly respond to it. They should be able to say yes or no from their heart. More and more clients are beginning to do that. But then it requires time – sometimes resources and sometimes just an open mind.

On Tata Indicom I want to make a point that there comes a time when the industry responds in a certain way which is fine and fair. There are also times when the industry doesn’t understand the TG and that results in a certain kind of shallow reaction. Tata Indicom is a classic case where the industry hasn’t understood. Our industry cannot think beyond the small designated narrow way. It is unable to understand anything outside.

The commercial is true to what it set out to be, to its objectives and the results are spectacular and very much in the public domain. It’s certainly not a safe campaign. I think people should question their assumption of what they think is good and bad work. It’s a campaign that gets noticed as it’s so different from what one is used to seeing and it has shown good results. If you don’t ask yourself about your judgment of advertising and how it accommodates this happening, then the questioning should happen not at the end of the people who create the advertising, but people who critique the advertising.

In the case of Tata Indicom, I would particularly like to make this point. To my mind, it’s not an emotional response but an intellectual one. Advertising cannot be an enforcer of good taste. The one area in the world that has no business judging its consumers is advertising. We cannot turn around and say that is low aesthetics, therefore, we will sneer at it. If we need to reach a certain TG we must respect their mindset and language. I think the problem here is the snobbishness, which I feel is very bad for advertising. You cannot be snobbish about your consumers and you can’t say that they are too low-brow and have bad taste according to your yardstick. The day you do that you no longer are being true to what your role is, because it has to be something exciting to the person you are catering to.

Mobile phone penetration is increasingly going lower and you are reaching a group whom you never would have thought in your wildest dreams would be buying mobile phones. By conventional yardstick is it loud, you bet it is. Is that an accident? Of course not, it’s by design. It is meant to be that way and it is to be consumed for what it is. I think it’s a step forward in advertising. It might not be for me perhaps, but it works very well for the person it is intended for.

There are rumours of many things and I won’t respond to that. The genesis of these rumours is the work Prasoon has done for films which are of high calibre. I can understand why some people would wonder why he should stick to advertising. For whatever reasons, but he wants to be in advertising. It’s just a testament of the quality of work he is doing in cinema. I was first asked this question 6-8 months ago and now again I am being asked the same, so it validates that this is just a rumour. If you are asking me if Prasoon or I will still be around seven years down the line, I don’t have a reply to that.

There have been losses. Virgin Atlantic, yes. We lost Bacardi and Goodyear because of global realignment. We’ve had some losses and some wins, that’s part of the game. Eventually if you kook into the 3-4 year period, you will see that in Delhi we have added enormous amount of business. The index of business is that we have been relentlessly recruiting over the last few years. It’s a growth market for us, it’s a driver market and Delhi is a strong performing unit. Eventually, if McCann Delhi creates buzz or not is something I can’t comment on, as it is for people who see us from the outside to comment. But overall McCann certainly cannot be accused of not having a buzz.

To me it was the closest advertising could get to art. It went way beyond what advertising sets out to do and achieving that with a lot of finesse. Prasoon (Joshi) had this image for some years now, it’s not something that originated overnight. I was sceptical of how it would turn out, but I think that the conception and the execution were magnificent. By far the biggest contributor has been the willingness of the client to go along, because when you put it on paper and describe things like people acting as headlights of a car, many might dismiss it as a joke. For Sameer Suneja to have trusted us on this and allowing this kind of latitude, I think is remarkable. The more the client accepts that advertising is an artistic expression and like any form of art advertising too requires a certain amount of experimentation, a certain amount of freedom. The more advertising gets acknowledged as an art form, I think, the better would be the quality of work that emerges.

We never set goals. It is simply about continuing to do what we want to do, in this case a certain work in a certain way with a certain group of people. Everything else follows this principle.