Book Review: Indian Advertising - Laughter and Tears

A great read for those interested in the world of advertising and its evolution in India

The art – and science – of advertising is quite fascinating. On average, mainstream filmmakers have anywhere between 90-150 minutes to tell their story. Book authors get 300 pages and 100,000 words. Working as a team, advertising copywriters and visualisers often get a single image and a sentence or two to tell an entire story, convey a (hopefully powerful) message, create an impact and convince people to spend money to buy a product or a service. If it’s a radio or a TV ad, every second of running time costs money. With print or Web, space comes at a cost. And hence advertisers have to learn to make do with less and ensure that their ad copy and visuals create maximum impact in the least possible amount of space and time. When done well, it’s art and science rolled into one wondrous package.

Many books have been written about advertising but there aren’t perhaps that many that specifically talk about Indian advertising – advertising and its evolution in India. Arun Chaudhuri’s Indian Advertising: Laughter and Tears is one such book and a very engaging one at that. It is a sequel of sorts to Chaudhuri’s earlier Indian Advertising: 1780 to 1950 and for anyone who’s ever been interested in getting to know more about how advertising works, to understand how advertising in India has evolved over the last 50-60 years, a better book you’ll probably not find.

Chaudhuri, a senior advertising professional who started in the 1970s, has worked with, among others, Clarion McCann, OBM and RK Swamy. He is now based in Calcutta and is the owner of BRAND, an advertising and market research firm. ‘In this brief history of Indian advertising, my attempt has been to present the profiles of people who may be called the movers and shakers of the profession. I have included memorable campaigns, which showcase Indian advertising in each decade,’ he says of Indian Advertising: Laughter and Tears. In the book, Chaudhuri starts with an overview of the advertising business in India in the 1950s. ‘Advertising was not a profession quite in the public eye. Not too many people regarded the profession as important; no one considered it glamourous, which may seem unbelievable today,’ he says of that period. Bombay, Madras and Calcutta were the first cities in the country where professional expertise in advertising developed, followed by Delhi in the 1970s.

Visuals from print ads of the era are provided in the book, which provide an interesting perspective on the way things used to be when computers and Photoshop did not exist. Notably, despite there being no imaging software back then, the visuals of advertisements from that era have a rare elan, a certain style that’s gone missing these days. ‘Editorial-style advertising’ is also mentioned, where the ad is a full-sized article rather than just an image and a line of text. This, of course, was the forerunner to today’s ‘advertorials,’ which have become the scourge of journalism because of advertisers’ insistence on making these as indistinguishable as possible from editorial content. Nonetheless, just looking at all those advertisements from the 1940s-1960s is quite the nostalgia-tinged visual treat.

The period 1960-1970 is presented as a time of transition for Indian advertising, which had to find ways to thrive in the face of war, food scarcity, shortages of just about anything and everything, and widespread black marketing. The author also notes that advertising in this period was still, by and large, the preserve of the English language – translations in a few local Indian languages only happened occasionally, almost as an afterthought, often only because some media planner wanted to include regional dailies or magazines in order to reach a wider audience. ‘It was not till the mid-1990s that Indian advertising transited to the vernacular,’ says Chaudhuri, who adds that up until the 1980s, advertisers did not have too many media options; newspaper advertising was the preferred choice, followed by the few magazines that existed back then.

1970-80 was, the author says, a period of growth for Indian advertising, despite political excesses that happened during the period, and the restrictive business practices mandated by the government of that time. This was also the time that saw the rise of ‘full service’ ad agencies, which handled everything from media planning and media execution, in addition to the creative elements of copy and design. For clients with smaller budgets, self-taught media planners did their best to swing deals that ensured higher levels of visibility, often with the support of smaller newspapers and magazines. As brand positioning and marketing became more important, advertising itself gained more credibility as a career option, with freshly-minted MBAs beginning to show interest in working with ad agencies. ‘HTA and Clarion [in Bombay] paid their account executives a monthly salary of around Rs 800 in 1975 when the Liril ad film was made,’ says Chaudhuri. ‘Art directors and copywriters, always a pampered lot in advertising, may have earned a trifle more, but they were adept at moonlighting. They earned enviable sums from all the work they did after office hours for smaller agencies,’ he adds.

In subsequent chapters, in which Chaudhuri charts the evolution of advertising in India from the 1990s to the early-2010s, he discusses the inexorable rise of television advertising, the new phenomenon of well-known film stars being featured in ad films, and the importance of ‘personalities’ in the ad business – people who drove the advertising business almost by the sheer force of their persona. In fact, throughout the book, Chaudhri provides interesting insights and vignettes pertaining to ad men and ad women whose names are now legendary – Homi Kharas, Subrata Sengupta, Subhas Ghosal, Alyque Padamsee, Bobby Kooka, Ajit Haskar, DK Gupta, Bal Mundkur, Subhas Sen, PL Tandon, Anne Mukherjee, Sushen Saha, Indrani Sen, Roda Mehta, Tapan Pal, Ravi Gupta, RK Swamy, Zafar Hai, Kailash Surendranath, Piyush Pandey, Prasoon Joshi and many others. For people who might not have heard of these names, they are responsible to some of the biggest, best, most creative advertising seen in India over the last 50 years, and the author has done a great job of telling their stories and charting their lineage.

Coming to how the world of advertising has changed irrevocably, Chaudhuri says: ‘I confess I no longer understand how one agency differentiates the way it arrives at the creative platform from another, when both come under the same international umbrella. Once upon a time, the creative at Ogilvy, Benson and Mather (OBM) followed a distinctive pattern that owed its origin to David Ogilvy. Times have changed. Now, O&M ads don’t have the look and feel of the Ogilvy gharana. Ulka ads between 1960 and 1980 were different from the ads created at HTA. Rediff ads had a distinctive feel that was different from the ads created at Trikaya. Enterprise and Frank Simoes crafted ads with their magic creative touch.’ He adds that it is the client who ultimately decides on the look and feel of advertising and it is perhaps clients – all MBAs – who have lost the calibre to judge good advertising.

To sum up, Indian Advertising: Laughter and Tears is an engaging, interesting book – one that I’d wholeheartedly recommend to anyone who’s interested in the business of advertising.

Indian Advertising: Laughter and Tears is available on Amazon