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Photo: K. Ananthan

FACE-TO-FACE With Priti Nair

The impact of words. A tweak here and there, and when accompanied by visuals, that is when you have great ads.

It was fun watching advertisements with college students at the GRD School of Commerce and International Business. Watching them with Priti Nair, CEO, National Creative Director of Grey India, was even more special.

She was in town to talk to the students on the present and future of Indian advertising.

Nair described advertising as a challenge. Especially in our country where the languages, cultures, lifestyles, economic levels, trends and traditions are so numerous.

“It is a difficult task in India, but if we work on basic human insights, it usually works. There is absolutely no need to be ‘clever’ or pseudo intelligent. We (Indians) are an emotional lot. The simplest things move us to laughter, tears, anger or happiness. So, everyday happenings, beliefs and convictions with some humour usually work,” she said.

Take the plywood ad. A Sikh family travels in a bus through Tamil Nadu.

Suddenly, the little Sardar, to the utter bewilderment of his parents, demands in chaste Tamil that the bus be stopped.

He strides into a house where an old lady welcomes him as her ‘swami’.

We, of course, have realised that he is none other than the old master of the house, reborn!

It is a little story that has been told to us, and somewhere in there is the message that the plywood used in that old home has long outlasted its original inhabitants.

“We have come a long way. It is no longer about showing a product, enumerating its qualities and telling the people to buy it. We have to make ads arresting. They are viewed as interruption to entertainment on television. Therefore, they have to be interesting and appealing enough to hold the viewers’ interest,” said Nair.

With Bollywood being so all pervasive, it is but inevitable that ideas are heavily borrowed from there.

Clichéd situations (land shark wanting to demolish orphanage; helpless children looking on; finally the triumph of good - in this case the indestructibility of a branded cement - over the bad guy, and so on) make the commercial click instantly with the masses.

Havell’s, Surf, Greenply, etc. are but some of the commercials Nair has been involved with.

When asked if there were ads she sorely wished she had been part of, she promptly said, “The Happy Dent Ads and the St Gobain ones.”

Advertisements can go beyond just selling a product.

They could become a mouthpiece for social issues, environmental matters and so on. Nair said that one of her most fulfilling was the “Balbir Pasha Ko AIDS Hoga Kya?” (Will Balbir Pasha get AIDS?) campaign.

Described as the everyman, the fictional Balbir Pasha let it be known to thousands and thousands of men what could happen if they were not careful about their sexual activities. As Balbir Pasha in Mumbai and as Pulli Raja in Chennai and Hyderabad, the campaign created a real buzz.

Nair spoke of obscenities in advertisements, the dos and don’ts and, and the great challenges of Indian advertising as opposed to the Western ones.

She said she was thrilled to see the moving away from blindly aping the West to implementing the Indianness in our ads. Now it was all about celebrating India.

Of the future of ads, Nair said that soon advertisements would be a big thing on the internet in order to reach the huge chunk of young adults.

But, that would take time she said, as still a gargantuan lot of Indians watched television and they would continue to do so for many, many years more.

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