.They call it Goafest and the branding is apt enough; the annual get-together of the advertising industry is very much a festive occasion, with an incredible number of awards being handed out to the great and good in the creative field. In between the wild partying and bouts of introspection, it’s all very ego-massaging and self-congratulatory—this year, an incredible 419 awards were handed out. (Last year, there were 318). The Oscars, the most watched award show globally, are given in just 25 categories.
Here’s the bottomline: Goafest faces virtually the same problems it did when it was instituted a decade ago. Amidst the bright lights, the vodka shots and the blaring music, what’s gone missing are the marquee ad agencies and industry gurus. Over the years, India’s leading agencies—such as Ogilvy & Mather, Leo Burnett, Creativeland Asia and BBDO India—have boycotted the event for various reasons, not the least being the credibility of the award process and the standard of judging. This year highlighted another concern—the lack of creativity. Goafest 2016 featured not a single Grand Prix award-winner in the creative and media fields. These categories attracted a total of 4,460 entries.
Everywhere in advertising, the celeb head pops up...whether it’s inverters or banians.
Over 4,000 ad executives were gathered in Goa but what counted were those who had stayed away rather than those who attended. A decade after swearing off Goafest, Mullen Lowe Lintas chairman R. Balakrishnan (Balki) made an appearance this year, but as a film-maker, not an ad-maker. Also in attendance this year was Piyush Pandey, executive chairman of Ogilvy & Mather India and South Asia, whose agency had opted to stay out of the Creative Abbies awards over the past few years. He said his agency’s stand has not changed and he was there to be felicitated on his Padma Shri. The guru troika was complete with adman and lyricist Prasoon Joshi, CEO of McCann World, India, showing up this year after staying away following the Ford Figo controversy—one of the ad industry’s biggest embarrassments—a few years earlier. It related to so-called ‘scam ads’ from JWT—work produced for the sole purpose of earning praise from colleagues and competitors and winning awards at events such as Goafest, for which these ads are specifically created. “An Ogilvy not participating in the Creative Abby is like the US not competing in the Summer Olympics,” chortles Pradyuman Maheshwari, media expert and editor and CEO of MxM, over a beer and fried Bombay duck at the Mumbai press club.
Bombay duck is a great metaphor for what the advertising world is going through. It’s a fish that is called a duck and it may taste fine but it also has a funny smell. In Indian advertising, there are paradoxes aplenty. Advertising spend has been, to paraphrase another famous tagline, “finger-lickin’ good”, but meeting a range of people from the industry suggests something else—grim faces, overstressed executives, cut-throat competition and a seeming lack of creative talent. Here are some examples. The Hutch ad, with its iconic pug, was released in 2003. It is back, 13 years later, in the latest Vodaphone campaign, with exactly the same message. Here’s another, of even more ancient provenance. Nearly 40 years after Lintas, under legendary adman Alyque Padamsee, launched its Liril ad, showing model Karen Lunel in a swimsuit frolicking under a waterfall with a bar of soap in her hand, Hindustan Unilever has recently released exactly the same ad using a different model but what looks like the same waterfall. “That they have recreated the ad is a tribute to its durability. It’s also disappointing that they have to go back 40 years,” says Padamsee. “It shows a creative blackout. Advertising has lost its soul.”
.It’s a lament heard more and more often these days and seems connected to the fact that, with MNCs dominating the Indian ad scene (eight out 10 top ad agencies are owned by global conglomerates), the bean-counters have become an integral part of the agency, robbing it of some of its earlier romance and creative freedom.
“That they recreated the old Liril ad after 40 years is a tribute to its durability. It also shows a creative blackout in advertising.”
Alyque Padamsee, Ad guru
Another advertising legend, Mohammed Khan, was more scathing. His speech at an event last year to honour him with a lifetime award was titled ‘Thank God I am out of it!’ He started by saying he was “saddened by what I see today...advertising design is conspicuous by its absence, and TV commercials are a rude and irritating intrusion into mindless and inane television content, with a few notable exceptions.” He then listed the reasons for his disillusionment, which included the cut-throat competition between agencies to grab accounts, and the change in relationship between clients and agencies. His main grouse was to do with the dominance of the account planner over creatives. The boot, he said, was on the wrong foot. He also exposed the lack of creativity in an ideas business by presenting a comprehensive list of ideas for the next campaign, regardless of whether it was selling cars or soap or insurance or condoms. The eight ideas he listed were: Amitabh Bachchan, Sachin Tendulkar, Salman Khan, Sachin Tendulkar, Amitabh Bachchan, Sachin Tendulkar and Mahendra Singh Dhoni. It was an emotion-charged speech by someone no longer part of the ratrace, but most agency heads privately admit that Khan is right on the money.
Paradoxically, it’s not about the money. The Pitch Madison Media Advertising Outlook report projected the ad market to reach Rs 42,234 crore in 2016. Here’s the downside. The intense competition that led to agencies consistently cutting their commissions has squeezed profits like never before. Naved Akhtar, who quit a leading ad agency to launch Shop, in partnership with another celebrated adman, Freddie Birdy, says, “Advertising is becoming incredibly cost-conscious.” That has in turn led to a squeeze on creativity. Former advertising professional Santosh Desai agrees: “With advertising budgets slashed, creative happens by accident.” Like him, many who were part of the ad scene during the boom years of the 1980-90s, now look back with nostalgia. “There was a burst of creativity back then, a cross-fertilisation of different voices. It was a fun place to be,” he says. Another industry veteran Shashi Sinha, CEO India of IPG Mediabrands, the global media holding company of Interpublic, one of the Big Four global players, admits that “the fun part is gone. It’s far more specialised.”
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