9 ways advertising is similar to farming

Both farmers and ad men repeat the same ideas year after year after year and develop skills over years of humiliation, writes Shashank Gupta, a former farmer and National Creative Director, Adfactors Advertising.

After five years of studying agriculture and six years of actually doing it, I chucked it all for what I believed was a much more comfortable existence, where the weather didn’t molest you at every turn and injuries didn’t accost you out of the blue. I became and remained a writer in advertising for no less than twenty-five years. Personally, what’s most common to the two professions is that I understand neither and have been a disaster at both. So, it is but natural why only I am most qualified to list down similarities between farming and a communications firm.

Both crops and campaigns can suddenly be destroyed: A shift in the weather, like rain followed by strong wind, can flatten a field of golden wheat within hours. A mood-swing – of the market, the client or a focus group – can kill an intuitive concept overnight. Sashay homeward and bare your soul to the street dogs for only they won’t grin at your misfortune.
Both make lifelong friends who pray for your early demise: If your cattle shed burns down, you are forlorn, but if your neighbour’s tractor goes up in flames too, you are fine. While the neighbour covets your acres, your thinly smiling advertising comrade wants your cabin.
Both are skills developed over years of humiliation: At what precise distance and depth words have to be planted to get the best yield, who would understand better than a farmer? The seed-rate for a crop is pre-determined and the economy of words is what it takes a lifetime to learn. Keep weeding, keep weeding, keep weeding, that’s life.
Both as business managers are nothing but glorified beggars: Once the crop is delivered they spend the rest of the season in chasing payments. You will find them on their knees and slithering on their bellies and rolling uphill to a temple for a long overdue cheque, but obviously at the minimum support price.
Both crop-directors and creative-directors crave technology: They imagine that the latest technology, a new drip irrigation system or computer software, will save them from a paucity of path-breaking ideas. They buy machines beyond their means and hope for the best. What they end up achieving is a lot of spare time spent in trivial pursuits of the fermented kind.
Both repeat the same ideas year after year after year: There are just that many crops and only so many concepts that the farmer and the big thinkers regurgitate like cows. The beauty is that the ignoramuses imagine themselves to be the creator himself. People call them gods-of-food and gods-of-ideas and they strut in their self-made mirage.
Both boast of working days and nights at a stretch: They tell the next generation how great they were and how they wore the same clothes until a field or a campaign was satisfactorily done in time. That smell you smell is not filthy armpits, it is what creates success, they expound in all sound and fury, having simply packaged an old idea in a new bottle or having bought merely a new variety of paddy, signifying little in the larger creative map.
Both are naturally found in fancy dress behaving like peacocks: In a gathering of decent folks, you turn around and stare at what they wear. Their shoes, their earrings, their colours, their hairdo, their loud manners, their boisterous behaviour, the volume of substance intake, and their language, goodness gracious. And also the insatiable desire to brag about their last yield. Impressionable juvenile observers may even consider them cool.
Both certified fools think the grass is greener in the other field: The farmer wants to run away from farming to an air-conditioned life in the city, and every advertising super-god wants to buy a plot of land and become a farmer. They have no idea whatsoever what they may be wishing for, hahahohohaha (villainous laughter).