Television content in any form will be supreme: KV Sridhar (Pops)

KV Sridhar (fondly called as Pops), National Director, Leo Burnett India, has spent over 32 years in the creative industry. He has seen the industry evolve into a confident and enthusiastic space of closely knit creative minds. In an exclusive conversation with Adgully, Pops goes down the memory lane and shares some insightful experience of the journey he has shared with the consumers and clients over the years. Excerpts:

Adgully: If you could share with us some of the key milestones of your career?

KV Sridhar (Pops): I guess each campaign whether it is good or bad is a milestone. I think I have had some wonderful experiences and now it will be 32 years since I started off in advertising. It has been a tremendous experience and frankly I do not know which of them could be pointed out to be a milestone. But I think it was momentous when we really started influencing the work, the industry and people sometime around 1987. It was the time when one of the first few campaigns for the brand- Taj Mahal Tea really got Indianised. This was when I was working at JWT Bangalore along with Chax(KS Chakravarthy) and Dharen Chedda, he used to be our Regional Planner then. So the three of us, one from planning, copy and ad, did some magical work in Bangalore then. As I mentioned before, one of the first one being the campaign for Taj Mahal Tea. The brand had shifted from Calcutta to Bangalore and we saw the earlier campaigns for the brand it represented a very western lifestyle and approach. However it had no relevance to the Indian consumers. So we changed the look and feel of the campaign owing to the fact that bulk of the sales for the brand used to come from its 10paise packs. The daily wage labours used to buy these packs and use it for a couple of days. It was also the time when television had started reaching a lot more people across the country. So keeping the Indian consumers in mind we changed the campaign line from "Ha! Taj" to "Waah! Taj" and Zakir Hussain was roped in for the TVC. The entire campaign really stood out and it affected a few big brands in the country who went into a transformation from being westernised and an urban brand to a mass Indian brand. It is a key milestone in the sense that it helped the brand to grow its sales and also made an impact on the whole marketing and advertising industry.

Ag: How has the creative space evolved ever since you began your career?

Pops: It has been fantastic the way the industry has changed and evolved. There was a time when we all used to feel in the 70s and 80s that we know nothing and that we need education from the West. So in those days once in a year or thrice in a year, we used to have international professionals and experts coming in and then people used to look upto them as Gods who will enlighten us and teach us a thing or two. We did not even think in our dreams that we would be fit enough for the world. So from that phase to actually resolving in 90s when we started saying to the world that we are good enough. In 90's the industry went through a phase where most of us like me, Chax, Kiran Khalap, Piyush Pandey, mainly the second generation of modern advertising struggled to actually prove to the world that we are as good as them if not better. But the generation now is already born with the self-belief. It is such a brilliant confidence in them, they have an urge to understand their own market and the generation also has easy access to most of the things. So this is the change that I have seen, from waiting for someone to come and teach us to self-learning and being self-reliant and from proving to the world that we are as good as them to knowing that we are as good as them.

Ag: If you could point out any of your work that made the client jubilant?

Pops: I think more than the creative thought it is the result of every campaign that makes the client jubilant. I think one of the nicest memory I have was in JWT Bangalore and when we had a huge success within just a span of one and a half years. We delivered around four to five great campaigns back to back and not just in terms of creativity but in terms of it helping the client's brand to grow. One as I mentioned before was for Taj Mahal Tea, the other one was for Iodex when it was stagnating as a balm for sprains, we recreated the "Ooh Aaah Ouch" magic as Iodex being the expert for backpain relief. The impact of the campaign was so good that the brand grew its sales and the trend went on for the next five years. The other great campaign we did was for Wipro, which launched their entire corporate campaign and built Wipro as a corporate entity. The campaign was one of the best insights one could have into IT. We decided that we will talk to the nation-makers and company owners for the campaign. We did a campaign where these top brass professionals were talking not in corporate board rooms but in informal environments like a golf course etc. And they are seen saying how finally they have a company like Wipro which can be trusted upon. The fourth campaign which was very successful was for Woodword's Gripe Water, where me, Chax, Dhar and Narayan Kumar worked together. The challenge was much bigger this time around because it was not a product that was prescribed by the doctors, the brand was on a decline and the brief given to us was that just to try and slowdown the decline. So we realised the best prescribers other than the doctor are mothers and grandmothers, so we got the four generations of a family in a TVC to prescribe the product. It not only arrested the decline but it improved the sales of the product tremendously. The fifth campaign which was very successful was for Crystal, which was the first huge oil brand we launched for ITC. Crystal was a groundnut oil brand, though the category died eventually it was a very good campaign. These were some of the most gratifying work that I enjoyed working on.

Next few memorable campaigns were when I was in Chaitra Leo Burnett around 1996-98. Those two years again we did some fantastic work like 'Enjoy the game' campaign for Reebok, the commercial got nominations at various award forums internationally. The other good campaign I remember was for Fiat Uno,one of the commercials had kids who were standing on a Uno watching a Cricket match and the other one was the very successful "Lift for my best friend" commercial. Besides the Thumbs Up bungee jumping commercial was another very memorable campaign.

Then I joined Lintas, and some of the memorable campaigns I did with R.Balki there, were for brands like Bajaj, Fair & Lovely, Parker, Saint-Gobain, Clinic, LG etc. So my best work came in three installments. I am back in Leo Burnett and I have been associated with the agency for last sixteen years now.

Ag: What roadmap have you charted for the agency?

Pops: I am waiting for somebody to make me feel redundant and come tell me that "Pops now you can retire". But there are many things to do because advertising as a field is very dynamic. Now I am pursuing many things apart from traditional media, I am really preparing the agency and the clients to adapt more and more of new media. Moreover finding a solution to a brand is far more important than any other thing. So be it a problem with the retail, like for instance even if my client's car is not selling in that one outlet in one city I do not mind going there and solving their problem. I will do it because we are supposed to be creative salesmen. Moreover we want to put people in the centre of everything and look at simplifying things.

Ag: What are some of the opportunities and challenges for advertising in today's cluttered media space?

Pops: The challenges in India are manifold compared to the other parts of the world. The transition from one medium to another for the West was smoother and they have already gone through the evolution curve. In India we compressed the entire evolution, so we went straight to colour TV even before black and white TV models could reach high penetration levels. Later we went straight to digital, we went straight to digital transmission and suddenly from four channels we went to 400 channels within a span of 24 months.

But I would like to point out that in India the older media will not die even if the penetration of new media increases. Hence still 90% of our work is Television though we talk of new media like mobile, internet etc. The reason for this is because literacy means more than knowing how write one's own name and if we were to take the meaning of literacy as to know how to read, to write and to interact then we do not even have 30% of the people educated in our country. So which means the 70% of our population still cannot read a newspaper, write an email or interact by sending SMS, they only use voice and understand audio-visual medium. Moreover, which is also why SMS in India is largely an urban phenomena, and out of the 650 million mobile phone users which we have hardly 50 million users SMS each other. So we have to invent newer forms to reach out to people through an audio-visual medium. Television content in whatever form which can reach to people conveniently will be supreme. In the rural areas mobile phone is more of an entertainment medium than being used for staying connected. So the industry has to be people focused rather than technology focused, we need to understand why people use certain technologies.

Ag: Can you tell us some of the clients you have in your kitty right now?

Pops: Procter & Gamble, Tata (Salt, Finance, shoe retail and Chemicals), Reliance (BIG TV), Mc Donald's, Heinz, HDFC Standard Life, Hindustan Petroleum, Coca Cola, Uninor and General Motors are some of the brands we are handling right now.

Ag: According to you what drives a creative mind?

Pops: Curiosity and enthusiasm to learn new things drives a creative mind. At times I think it is not right to call us creative because there is nothing creative about the things we are doing, all we do is try and understand how people behave. We try to connect to two things which cannot be linked in the context of the brand's problem.

Ag: Any specific product category that you want to work on?

Pops: Anything that is new excites me, which is what I am doing right now. I am trying to work on social networking sites, I would love to propagate many digital aspects of the medium. I would like to work on and to understand how does one sell Google to people who do not know how to read and write. And of course I would like to work on some Government advertisements. Some of the Government ads today are not clear in the sense who are they trying to talk to and who are their end listeners. In fact my purpose to be in advertising for the next 10 years is to improve the quality of Government ads.

Ag: Do you think the industry lacks good creative thinkers and executors?

Pops: We do not lack in anything, we have everything available in abundance. We only have to wait and discover. We have a lot of talent across the country but advertising is not very attractive for them. However, talented students from smaller institutes are coming into the industry and making a name for themselves. Besides the advertising industry has shifted from being strategy and research driven to much more creative driven. We are only creative planners and creative thinkers. Our planning is specific to consumer planning and campaign planning.

Ag: Do you feel the effectiveness of ad jingles has reduced today?

Pops: At one point in time we did not know what to do with Television because we had problems visualising as people then were used to writing copy and jingles. Today advertising has evolved and hence maybe jingles have faded away. But music has an important role to play in advertising and as a country we love sound and music. Music being an integral part you cannot take it away but it will be used in a way where audio and video will work collaboratively. However earlier ad jingles used to work independently, and we used the same commercial across radio and Television.

Ag: Any message for young talent...

Pops: Keep at it. Keep the enthusiasm going. Advertising is a lovely profession, where one can have fun and enjoy. It is a profession where people pay you money to live well. Have an interest to do everything. The more things you do and the more you enjoy life, you will be more successful in advertising. |By Prabha Hegde [prabha(at)adgully.com]