A couple of days back I read that Santosh Desai was leaving hardcore advertising. Not surprising I thought, for a man of his thinking and abilities, he probably felt stifled at McCann. And he probably would have felt the same in any other agency.
Then this morning I read an interview with him in AgencyFaqs, where he vented his frustrations on what he called the “narrow and one-track mindedness” of the industry where he’s spent 20 years in. A large part of it, where he was the boss!
Kicking up a storm, into Agencies’ corner offices.
Not surprisingly, the interview was flooded with comments in the last 10 hours (16 comments until the writing of this post). While most commenters praised his insights and commended his decision, not surprisingly some of them accused/asked Santosh what he did to change things?
While it’s a valid question (and something we all should ask ourselves, when we complain)… but I was surprised that some people had the gall to suggest that Santosh did nothing to change the business.
Not to discredit the others at McCann India, but the stature that the agency has today hasn’t just fallen out of the skies with some divine intervention. Nor can you say any one person alone (as some would say perhaps Prasoon Joshi) changed the face of the agency.
Before the arrival of these two gentlemen, McCann’s creativity and strategy were at best mediocre (For example, remember the atrocious work done for Coke in the early days before the Santosh-Prasoon team up?)
No more panning planning.
Then there’s Account Planning. I cannot think of too many people who brought as much respect to Account Planning, as Santosh did. He made Creative Directors in other agencies look at their planners in a new light. He even got a lot of them to consider making planners their ‘equal partners’ in creativity!
I think we need to give Santosh a lot more credit than he’s being given.
At the same time, what gives anyone the idea, that Santosh is finished now? Or that he won’t make a difference to the business of advertising, as “a client”.
It takes two to Tango. On the dance floor, or the creative floor.
Most of us won’t admit it, but most agencies are completely driven by their clients’ thinking. Their resistance to learning and trying new things comes not from their own lack of interest, but rather from what they think the client would buy and what the client would resist! As weird and uncomfortable as it may sound, this is the reality. The more experimentative our clients are, the more experimentative are their agencies.
And finally, if we simply absorb Santosh’s comments with the right spirit, we may actually be able to do something positive about it. With or without our clients’ help!
A few good people are all it takes.
At the same time, I would like to acknowledge that we’re not as bad as it may sound. There are still a whole bunch of people around here, with the skills and the courage to fight and make a difference. The folks at Ogilvy, for example, and the folks at Webchutney, who have moved from conventional advertising to creating terrific campaigns online. We just hope to see more and more of us who never give up on trying to do new and interesting things, inside and outside of their agencies.
UPDATE 26 December 2006: Quick after Santosh’s interview appeared, some of the big guns of Indian advertising, including heads of agencies, responded in an interview, in an uncharacteristic but gratifying manner.
Thankfully they remained objective and didn’t trash Santosh’s thoughts. Although they did brand his thoughts as part of an emotional outburst in a moment of weakness, which they said, most of us could relate to.
It was also interesting to note how each individual pushed their own agency agenda/sales, pitch to counter some of Santosh’s allegations. Ambi of FCB Ulka talks of Santoor and Amul as examples of long-term thinking. Ashutosh Khanna tried to get clever with a Close Up example, which immediately backfired on him, as a result of a comment Piyush Pandey made in the same article 🙂
Talent, what talent?
All five agency heads, however, rightly veered to and agreed with “the lack of talent in our business”. Which if you ask me, is the core of all our problems. While there are a few good men and women in the business, they’re (without exception) overworked and stretched for thinking and execution time. The number of talented people also hasn’t grown proportionately with the size of our business. So the mediocre thrive, and we’re saddled with tonnes of crap masquerading as creatives, client servicing execs, and of course clients!
This brings me back to what Santosh said, and the ‘big five’ off-handedly agreed with… the question to ask and keep discussing about the future is, “what are we doing about it??”
