More or less, here’s how it goes. My father is serving a life sentence for murder, my mother ran away when I was a kid, I am in advertising and my brother pushes “mary and jane” to make a living. Well, he’s the only one who’s managed to stay relatively clean in the family. Now I am in a dilemma. On one hand, I’ve been offered a ransom to work for a leading Ad agency as one of their one too many art directors. On the other hand (I have big hands), I could worm my way into this small agency with a salary just about enough to feed a worm, but become a creative director and then chairperson or vice president, and all this way before I hit 30. All this power! And in this business, power is everything. Wouldn’t it be cool, to sit in the hot seat to decide what is brilliant and what is shockingly lame? To choose what gets entered into the shows and what doesn’t. Wow!
As for now, I sit in my little corner licking my wounds after having my campaign savaged by an incompetent hack sitting in a plush office. I say to myself, I’ll be sitting in that chair. And when I do, man, I will be on total cruise control. I’ll be judge and jury, savior and executioner. Life will be good. Hell, life will be pretty awesome! But holding on to that lazy boy, massaging backrest luxury isn’t all that easy, you have to be funny, corny and goddamn serious to make sure the viewers shell out their hard earned money on these products in the times where clever and funny commercials stick in your head. And much to your dismay, so do the really annoying ones and then there is always the culture police staging a protest here and a protest there against the underlying messages of an ad. Now let me tell you, frankly, in our society if we take the underlying messages of all the ads we’re exposed to, they are remarkably consistent in the values they promote. And if we built a society based on those values, it would be a pretty self-centered, materialistic, live-for-the-moment, hedonistic, hyper-competitive freak show society. Which is pretty much what we’ve got.
The question I find myself asking, more than once is after a brilliant creative and being an exemplary ad maker, which is of course after you’ve got shiny little trophies to prove it, do we in some strange way become ingenious sales person’s too. Or is that sales associate, in these everybody’s-got-to-have-a-dignified-title times? Imagine Hundreds of rupees, perhaps even millions worth of goods and services that you’ve sold on behalf of your clients throughout the course of your career. Now how do we advertisers of the third world do that, its easy, we talk CONSUMERISM, which is serious, joyless, boring, and quite self-righteous. Well getting back to where I started, climbing the ladder in this industry is tough and it definitely isn’t a joy trip, you will have to be dangerously radical, put down protest signs that uniformed NGO’s scream on ads breeding psychological conflict, give the manifestos a rest and finally as my boss would say “if you have to, take off your clothes, throw them down the sewer and run home buck-naked.” Now that is severely altered.
There is enough and more pressure in the agency business that can keep your child bearing and making years quite busy. The creative feel it to get great work produced. The account people feel it to keep their client happy and spending his money. The president feels it to be winning new business. The chairman feels it to be making a profit and keeping his Board happy. And the Board feels it to keep his stockholders happy. If you work in an agency, there's the additional pressure of unceasing deadlines, demanding bosses and corporate politics. And if the agency loses a client (happens all the time), you could be out of a job. There's a saying, "It's only advertising." It's true. Advertising is not rocket science. However, if you're serious about the business, and most are, it can feel like mortal combat. I've worked with many whose philosophies are Survival of the Fittest, and The End Justifies the Means, but somewhere if there were a survey done about which careers the public respected most. I'm not sure which ranked the highest, but I know "Advertising Executive" ranked somewhere at the bottom. I think it was between "Lawyer" and "Used car salesman." I guess the Indian public considers that being saved from Ring-around-the-Collar isn’t like being saved from cancer or nuclear war. But in some vague way I have to admit it does seem a bit weird when some woman working on a cure for AIDS is in some lab cubicle somewhere making Rs.5000 (about 100 dollars) while the guy who came up with "For everything else, there is ….." is probably sitting in some corner office making a million.
As for me, what I like to do is write I’ve been fortunate to land at a place that doesn’t punish me politically but pays a paltry amount it jokingly calls salary, and I believe that is rare.
For my grand finale here’s a little insightful poem that’s quite well circulated within the advertising fraternity in India...we folks swear by it
When the client moans and sighs
Make his logo twice the size.
When the client's hopping mad,
Put his picture in the ad.
If he still should prove refractory
Add a picture of his factory
BTW, mom, dad, bro..If you were to read this piece of doodle ever….Would you consider this artistic exuberance for the good of advertising and the society that we live in and not defamation? At least I used the “C” word.
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—About our writer:
Tejaswini Gopalaswamy finds it a little weird to write about herself. Anyway, she works in an advertising agency and is educated enough to get her bread buttered. When she is not working, this wannabe standup comedian is either writing or playing jester.
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