Exclusive | The man who got us 'Achche Din'...Anuraag Khandelwal

While General Election 2014 was touted as the biggest national event in the country, media experts believe that this could possibly be one of the finest political marketing campaigns ever. The yet-to-be-sworn-in Prime Minister Narendra Modi was the face of the campaign of the then opposition – Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Understandably, leading the party to victory was not an easy task for him or the party alone. Humongous level for planning and execution were obviously put in place; apart from that it involved lot of work force who worked behind the scenes to create the message that cut through across the Indian populace. Devising politically driven message required a knack designing nuanced communication chart. Apart from reaching out to millions of voters across geographies, creativity played a vital role in this election campaign.

Adgully gets the leader of the creativity workforce on ‘brand Modi’ campaign – Anuraag Kandelwal, Executive Creative Director and Creative Head, Soho Square to talk about the ingredients of the winning campaign and more.    

This is the first political campaign for Ogilvy. Telling us about how Soho Square ended up becoming a part of the BJP campaign mandate and the start of the journey, Kandelwal said, “Narendra Modi had asked Piyush Pandey to help him out in this election campaign. But Piyush could not do it directly as traditionally Ogilvy  ​has not worked on advertising ​ for political parties. Soho Square being the subsidiary agency of Ogilvy,  ​and since Samrat Bedi, Satish deSa and I have trained under Piyush ​ in Ogilvy, he​put his faith in us to do the needful”.

In a recent interview given to a publication, Ogilvy captain Piyush Pandey said: ‘I wrote Abki Baar Modi Sarkar and Anuraag Kandelwal and Nilesh Jain wrote Achche Din Aane Wale Hai’. Speaking about the drivers that led to these slogans, Kandelwal stated that the biggest driver to this was the sentiment of the 1.3 billion people of this country. “It was clear to​ us in the assembly polls of 2013 when BJP won 31 seats in Delhi and swept Rajasthan, MP, Chattisgarh and that the country was looking for a change. Also, research indicated that Narendra Modi's recall was higher than that of BJP. So we decided to stay away from the conventional multi-face communication messages and announce the name of Modi as the man to prefer and vote for. This decision addressed the campaign task of projecting Modi as the Prime Ministerial candidate”, he said.

These lines mentioned have been chanted by the young and old in the country for months now. As creators, sharing his feeling of watching his and his team’s work go this far, Kandelwal shared, “It is still seeping in :) It's been a phenomenal experience. We could never imagine in our wildest dreams that our campaign will touch the hearts of a billion people in this manner. And when Mr.Modi, in his victory speech, said "Acche din aane waalen hain", it was a moment like no other. We at Soho Square are truly honored and humbled by this experience”.

When asked to rate this assignment on difficulty and toughness level, Kandelwal stated that this is the biggest campaign of his career. “I remember when I and Satish did the IPL Carnival film a couple of years ago, we thought that it was the toughest campaign we had done. But, like Piyush sa​id, the BJP campaign was like 3 IPLs in 3 months! It was a herculean task and I must say that the BJP worked with us day and night on this. I always say that no great piece of work is possible without the faith of a great client. The BJP has been a very sharp and supportive client. All the nights that Soho put in to develop the work has paid off and how”!

Every client you work with comes with a baggage and history. Considering the highly debatable personality and past of the face of the campaign: Narendra Modi, did that come in way of their strategy planning? Responding to this Kandelwal said, “Not at all! In fact, the BJP and Soho co-created a lot of the strategic planning. The people at BJP are extremely focused and astute. None of the work we did would have been possible without their spot-on brief and research done by the BJP”.

Concluding the conversation, we asked him that merely as creative professionals, if there was one thing that the opposition party and its agency could have changed / altered in their campaign, what would that be, he said, “Train their product”!

Earlier, Kandelwal was Senior Creative Director at Ogilvy. He started his career with Ambience Publicis as visualiser before moving to Ogilvy in 2000.