Economic transformation and employability are the key factors towards making India’s demographic dividend, the young workforce, a significant competitive advantage. In this context, the National HRD Network (NHRDN) Mumbai Chapter, recently organised a Career Fest at Nehru Centre in Mumbai. The aim was to provide a common platform to bring together industry, academia and student community, with the intention of helping students to make informed career choices. Senior adman and accounts advertising planner, Sourabh Mishra, who is also a visiting faculty at Xavier Institute of Communication, talked on advertising as a career and gave very focused information from the perspective of someone who has specialised for over 25 years in strategy and planning in ad agency business
To all who had gathered, who aspired to be in advertising industry or wanted to explore the idea of being somewhere in advertising, Sourabh Mishra, in his talk explained what it takes to be in advertising and what the field is all about.
Advertising is supposed to help business and the way I understand it is very broadly categorised. Business is broadly made of four areas: finance and accounts - people who manage the money; manufacturing or product development; people who manage human resources; and then comes the sales and marketing. These four areas broadly make the business run. So, if I am in sales and marketing, then probably I am contributing one-fourth to what business is all about.
Getting a little deeper, in marketing itself, broadly speaking, there are four areas of specialisation in marketing, starting with product understanding, like what the product is, along with developing and managing the product. There are specific pricing managers, people who manage the price and play the whole game of price. Then there are distribution and logistics managers, who look at the whole supply chain of distribution. And then there is promotion, which is promoting the brand and communicating. So, if I have decided to specialise within marketing, say in promotion, that’s again I am contributing one-fourth to marketing. Now promotion can also be broken-up into marketing communications.
Marketing communications, very simply put, can be broken up into advertising, publication, Customer Relationship Management (CRM), direct marketing, and Below the Line (BTL) marketing activity. Now if I am in advertising, then I will probably be contributing one-fourth to the whole marketing communications promotions.
I have worked for over 25 years now and I have got few more years to work. When I started working, I had made up my mind that when I grow really old—if I have grandchildren and they come and ask me what did you do in your life, I would hate to tell them that I contributed one-fourth of one-fourth of one-fourth, that is one by sixty-fourth to the development of business in some way. And therefore, if you focus too much on just being in advertising and if you have taken up advertising, I want you to think again that advertising is business first, you have to look at it as business first to understand its overall meaning—then only will you get to contributing little more than one by sixty-fourth of business. So, I don’t think any of you want to be so insignificant. Nobody wants to be a little ant-all of you want to make a mark. Therefore, start thinking business first, before thinking advertising.
Famed adman, Jerry Della Femina, the creative genius behind many brilliant ad campaigns once said, “I honestly believe that advertising is the most fun you can have with clothes on”. That is the reason perhaps why most people get into advertising, it’s all great fun career.
Famed adman Jerry Della Femina, the creative genius behind many brilliant ad campaigns once said, “I honestly believe that advertising is the most fun you can have with clothes on”. That is the reason perhaps why most people get into advertising, it’s all great fun career
It’s salesmanship mass-produced. If a businessman could go and have individual conversation with each one of his customers, nobody would be in advertising. So, advertising is, like David Ogilvy use to say, it is a salesmanship in print. Now of course it is digital and lot more, but broadly it is salesmanship mass-produced. It can make the difference between business success and failure. It is a very cost efficient way of telling buyers what is for sale and what the product’s interests are. It seems to pursue the prospective customer to consider a particular brand. In very simple way, the process is that you have - a sender who in most cases is business who is speaking about business and there is receiver who is the consumer.
Advertising is basically connecting the sender to the receiver through communication. We have different media, you can be using digital social media, you can be using print, you can be using television, you can be using films—these are the different ways of communicating and connecting your business to the end consumer.
Good advertising is not like you have come with a fantastic idea. It might be a fantastic idea, a great piece of creative work—you feel that you are creative, which is why you want to get into this business. But your idea is creative only if it’s helping the business. That’s what the advertising is all about.
The neuroscientists and neurologists tell us that the left side of the brain is all about logical, mathematical, and analytical and you have the right side of the brain, which has do with emotions, art, music and creativity. The beauty of advertising is that it is not left brain or right brain, it goes beyond that. It kind of bridges neural thinking, which is logical and lateral thinking, and it flexes you to keep moving between the two. You have to be as much of a sharp businessman, understanding and analysing the problems and then use the right side of your brain to craft creative solutions to be able to solve it and that’s the true joy of creativity. If you think that you have it in you, if you think that excites you, then I think advertising is a good career for you.
Advertising is about logic and magic, it is about science and it is about art, it’s about business and creativity. And this is what we say is the business of advertising. If you begin to understand that you are solving business problems, you get excited by that and excited by business, advertising is the choice you have.
Top management and leadership team. In typical advertising agency structure more or less cutting across different kinds of agencies is- there is a top management and leadership team, they are CEOs, COOs, who come under the support services. Basically in advertising—as an HR person you can join advertising, but you will be a support service. A finance person is a support service, because that’s not the core business of advertising.
It is a front end function and involves interacting with clients, managing clients and managing the agency. These are called client services or account management people, who understand client business
They are the writers, they ideate with writing and art. Creative people work with ideas that come from writing, art, and ideas perspective of designs.
This is the part that I have specialised for many years. These are the people who actually are taking the problems and trying to figure out strategically what is the answer, before creative people start working on the actual creative development. Planning is understanding consumers, business and a lot of research—there will be a lot of market research work, to understand the real problems are.
There are two parts to any communication.
For any piece of communication or anything that you create, there are two parts to it. For example, you take any ad film— there are two parts to it. One is how you say it and how the crux is expressed in terms of the film. But what you have to say is where strategy comes in. When I started my career, I had a really tough time explaining to my father that I am an Account Planner. He said that I had done marketing, then how did I go into accounts field. Then I explained to him that it was accounts advertising planning. Then he asked if I do writing for ads and I said no. Then he said if I manage the ad agency and I said there are client services people to do that. Then he asked what I really do in the ad agency.
The way to answer that question— one is about strategy and thinking it through. Other thing—if one thinks of the meeting that happens, there is a client at the conference room table, along with client servicing person, agency creative director and a planner. The client will say that this is my brand and this is my business. The client servicing person actually comes in with saying that this is my client and this client has to be managed. After understanding client’s business, I have to understand my agency’s business and I have to put the two together. In the first place, the client says this is my brand, the servicing person says this is my client, the creative person says this is my ad or this my idea. So, who is the planner going to take the ownership of? The planner will say this is my consumer. The consumer is someone who is not represented at that level, but is the most critical part of the business. Everything that you create has to impact everyone.
Advertising is about logic and magic, it is about science and it is about art, it’s about business and creativity. And this is what we say is the business of advertising. If you begin to understand that you are solving business problems, you get excited by that and excited by business, advertising is the choice you have
We primarily for the most part, do consumer research. We work really closely with market research agencies. We are the user of that research. You yourself will go out and do a fair amount of qualitative research work. Good planners and strategy people, work on extremely interesting social trends, like what’s happening in society. As a planner, you also watch what people are watching. You observe them; you understand what’s happening, what they are ready to accept and what they are not ready to accept. What is the motivation, what are their fears, what are they emotionally going through. And then you look at the brand and look at the client’s problem and work out what is the kind of story we need to tell this people. This is what people are feeling, this is what my audience is understanding. So, what is it that I need to tell them? That is strategy, which then the creative person takes over and does the magic that you see on the screen.
When you are starting with your career in advertising, you have to understand where the industry is going. There is a saying in English “The king is dead, long live the king”, it means that the person who is the king is dying, but the kingship has to continue. So, somebody else will come and become the king. I think advertising is going through something very similar. You could actually say advertising is dead, but long live advertising. It should define advertising in a very narrow and constrictive way—say that I want to create a press advertising—my creative friends have coined a term called Printosaurus—these are the people in advertising who are dying out.
Today’s generation read news on their smartphones- my college going son also does that. When he is logging on, he is getting news on his social media feed. So, is he consuming news? Yes he is. Is he consuming newspaper? No, he is not. If I need to communicate to him, if I need to advertise to him-but if I continue thinking in the old-world-way of print advertising, it will be dead end for business before it starts. However, you should think that advertising is not about print, television or anything—it is a way of communicating business to consumer and that is never going to die. People need to communicate with each other. If I have a business in Mumbai, say I need to sell my products may be all over Maharashtra, all over India or all over the world—how do I reach out? How do I communicate? That process of communication will continue and that’s why the basic concept of advertising will continue.
An American billionaire, Mark Cuban, is a big investor and big Trump critic and in one of his recent interviews, he speaks about the jobs that will be most in demand, the kind of talents that will be most in demand, ten years down the line. He says that skills like liberal arts, philosophy, languages, will be most in demand, because most of the engineering kind of jobs will be taken over by automation, which is Artificial Intelligence (AI) and machine learning. So, in the future, for advertising people, their future is going to be extremely bright, because you need to understand the softer issues that drive human beings, to connect with them and communicate ideas.
Each situation is unique. One of advantages of using a celebrity is that I can cut across and my cut through is huge. Hundreds of ads are coming out every day. If I hire Salman Khan as my brand ambassador, at least lot of young people will notice that ad. It cuts through the problem of noticeability. So, that’s the only thing that it adds. After that it depends on what is the need for that story.
by Rajesh Rao
