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The mad men of India

What's common between an American TV show set in the '60s and India's advertising scene? Plenty, it seems. Apoorva Dutt connects the dots.

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The cigarette campaigns were beautiful,” KV ‘Pops’ Sridhar, the national creative director of advertising agency Leo Burnett, remembers dreamily. We are sitting in his cabin, whose walls are lined with gleaming statuettes. “My favourite is Charminar cigarettes in the ’80s,” he says. The poster had a man vrooming away on a bike with a girl riding pillion; it said: ‘Give me a girl. Give me a bike. And give me my toasted tobacco’.

Ad men certainly love their tobacco campaigns. The first episode of American drama TV series Mad Men that premiered in the US in 2007, and has just started in India, opens with protagonist Don Draper heading a powerhouse marketing campaign for Lucky Strike cigarettes. How do you market a murderous carcinogen? “Lucky Strike: It’s toasted,” Draper says at a meeting. It’s a diversionary tactic. “Everybody else’s cigarettes are poisonous,” he tells his clients. “Lucky Strike are toasted.” The clients are sold.

The uncanny part about the TV show is that though it’s about an American advertising firm in the ’60s, its stories could have been lifted straight out of the advertising industry in India.

THE YOUNG GUNS
Don Draper is the centre of the Mad Men world. He is a survivor, a risk-taker, and a creative mind that can crack any campaign. Ask ad men here for the Don Draper of India, and you are pointed towards Agnello Dias and the legend who’s taken to theatre, Alyque Padamsee.

Dias set up his agency Taproot in 2009 after spending years in JWT. Draper also started his own agency after years at a larger one. Sitting in his office in Mahim, Mumbai, Dias remembers that in 1978, the industry seemed to be made up of Mad Men-like characters. “Ad men were an exclusive club who ran the country’s likes and dislikes. The secretaries had to be pretty... Lintas had a bar that served beer after 7pm.” Dias remodelled Thums Up’s image in the early ’90s. “It was too macho, so we had an ad with bungee jumping — still adventurous, but quirky.”

The JWT Ford scandal (see box) allows for another Mad Men parallel. Salvatore Romano is an art director in the show who is fired for no fault of his. The justification is that heads must roll to keep clients happy. Immediate connections can be made with Bobby Pawar, the creative director at JWT, who was fired recently after the Ford ad scandal. “Bobby just had to bear the brunt of the public backlash,” says a senior copywriter in a top agency, who didn’t wish to be named.

The number of women in the Indian advertising world has seen a dip since the ’80s. “Then they were CEOs and heads of agencies. No more,” says Dias. Again, the Mad Men world seems uncomfortably familiar. On the show, Peggy Olson is the lone female copywriter in the agency. Louella Rebello, who wrote the tagline ‘Reclaim your life’ for Tata Safari, is currently the executive creative director at DDB Mudra, and one of the few women in a top position in the industry.
Similarly, Anuja Chauhan may have turned away from advertising after 17 years in the business to write bestselling books, but find us one urban Indian who hasn’t heard of at least one slogan coined by her — ‘Yeh dil maange more’, ‘Mera number kab aayega’, and ‘Oye bubbly’ — and we will show you a pig that flies.

THE SUPPORTING CAST
Pops has been in the business over 34 years. Like Mad Men character Pete Campbell, he started as a creative, but transferred to client servicing for most of his career. “When I started out, there were a lot more ponytails. The more you smoked up, the more creative you were,” he chuckles. Pops fondly remembers the fax machine campaign, with the tag-line, “Think of it as a 20-second courier,” says Pops, with pride. Just as Leo Burnett referred to a previous technology to sell the fax machine, the agency in Mad Men sold the telegram (that was challenged by the telephone) with the line: “You can ignore a call, but you can’t ignore a telegram”.

Mad Men also shows how modesty is not an ad man’s strongest point. And Prahlad Kakkar doesn’t disappoint. “I am the only Mad Man. The last of the Mohicans,” Kakkar guffaws. He shares some traits with Roger Sterling, a partner at the Mad Men agency. Both are glib, egoistic, fun-loving, and ultimately, gifted ad men. They also have their finger on the pulse of the ad world — Roger, by being Don’s only confidant, and Kakkar by virtue of the years he’s worked on iconic campaigns for Pepsi, Nestle and Britannia.

Prahlad points to the ‘Cadbury Girl’ ad as one that was a true image makeover for women. The Cadbury girl won hearts when she tripped out onto a cricket field to do a celebratory jig. “Every woman said, I could do that! It was both identification and aspiration. The perfect ad,” he says decisively.

THE WISER & CRAZIER
Piyush Pandey, the national creative director of O&M, was behind ‘Cadbury girl’. “I wanted to show that a young woman enjoying herself is okay. I am the youngest of seven artist sisters, so I am very used to expressive women,” he says.

Mad Men includes events of 1964, which was a big year for women’s liberation. No longer could advertisers depend on the ‘it will find you a husband’ line to sell beauty products. “Indulge yourself,” says Peggy while trying to get the Ponds Cream account. “Your beauty is your own.” The slogan is approved.

In the show, the agency is headed by Bertram Cooper, the eccentric boss whose affinity for Japanese culture, reflected in his cabin’s décor. He doesn’t allow shoes in his cabin, and everyone in the agency is terrified of his bluntness. Alyque Padamsee had a tank full of fish and a rowing machine in his cabin at Lintas. “Yes, I would often row during meetings,” Padamsee concedes. “I was getting fat.”

Padamsee — who gave us Surf’s Lalitaji, the Liril waterfall girl, and the Kamasutra ads — has a razor-sharp creative mind like Draper, and his eccentricities rival that of Bertram Cooper. Legend has it that Padamsee was once dictating to a secretary who didn’t have her shoes on. He left for a meeting in a car and directed her to get in the car with him. After driving for ages, when he was done, he asked her to leave — in the middle of the road.  “She was too terrified to say anything!” cackles Pop. “But that’s Alyque for you.”

Padamsee remembers fighting hard for the Kamasutra ad. “I was hauled up by the advertisement committee,” he remembers. “I said, it’s a bloody condom ad. What should I show? Young boys blowing them up as balloons?”

But there’s one critical difference between the TV show and India: Reality. While Mad Men are allowed unfettered creativity, India’s ad men have their limitations. “We have to appeal across a wide spectrum,” says Dias. “So that limits us. Javed saab once said something which works well for Indian advertising: In the West, they make music to listen to. Here, we make music to sing along to. People want ads that get stuck in their head.”
 

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