Piyush Pandey on Modi's run to 7 Race Course

BJP's winning Lok Sabha campaign relied on simple, direct language to strike a chord with voters. In his new book, the advertising guru explains how it took shape

On 7 September 2013, the BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party) declared that Narendra Modi, the then chief minister of Gujarat, would be its prime ministerial candidate. This was a master stroke, even as the media was speculating on whether or not the BJP would name a candidate for prime minister in case a BJP-led coalition was voted to power. The BJP’s announcement of Narendra Modi as its prime ministerial candidate suggested that he would be the prime minister of a BJP government, not a BJP-led coalition government.

Shortly after, came the audacious target that the BJP set for itself and announced: 272+ seats. In other words, a simple majority without the help or support of any other party.

Who would the BJP choose as their communication partner? After numerous presentations, the BJP awarded the account to Soho Square, a WPP agency that Ogilvy managed. The first task for Soho Square was to understand the subtle shifts in voter sentiment.

Once we got an understanding of what the voters felt, we had to come up with what the voters wanted to hear and what they would believe.

The brief was crystal clear: There would be only one name, Narendra Modi, in all communication, which led, unambiguously, to “Ab ki baar, Modi Sarkar”.

There were a hundred possible ways to take this thought forward, while ensuring that the messages resonated with the voter sentiment which we had identified. For print and for outdoor, we kept it simple, riding on the back of rhymes styled after the doha, “Bahut hui gundagardi, lootmaar, ab ki baar Modi Sarkar,” for example. (There’s been a lot of crime and robbery, it’s time for Modi’s government.)

For the TVCs, we decided on using the voice of the people. Real people and their real voices and their real frustrations and concerns. When I presented the first film campaign which used real people, capturing testimonials of their views and pains, the seasoned politician was stunned. What’s this? Just one human being shot against a black background? Wouldn’t that be boring? We insisted that it would be far from boring; that it would be riveting. We told them that the starkness would make the films real and believable.

I showed them how this might look, using the Amitabh Bachchan Cadbury work that we had done to address the worms issue, as an example of how this campaign would eventually look. We argued that we needed to see the fear, the tiredness, the anger, the anguish, the hopelessness clearly.

It was a tough campaign to buy, and a tough one to sell as well. The BJP team talked it over quickly and gave us the go-ahead.

We explained that we would work with real people; we could not have a Piyush Pandey talking in both Hindi and Tamil. Finally, we ended up doing an astonishing eighty of these testimonials. We took real people, real stories, real issues. The raw material came from the BJP briefing team. For each state, they knew the issues that mattered, they knew what pained the constituents the most. The BJP workers had been working on this for so long that they had everything pat and ready for us, which is why we could roll the films out at the speed that we did.

The other big factor in the success was the clarity in the role of definition. Our job was, simply, to create the communication. We didn’t have to worry about media or social media or placement or planning; that was someone else’s headache. This freed us to concentrate on the task at hand.

We were brought on board in February, just before the T20 World Cup. We wanted to ride on its extraordinary popularity and viewership, but the ‘testimonial’ campaign would not work when the audience wanted to watch cricket. There was no way that a sad story would find acceptance.

I explained to the BJP think tank that we needed a new, radically different campaign that spoke to this younger, less involved audience. I presented an animation campaign after a lot of selling. (To the best of my information, I do not think a satirical political campaign in animation has ever been done, so I couldn’t show them any references.) Moreover, I shared my idea of cricket-specific ads without any politician in the campaign. They weren’t convinced. We were — so we brought in an NID-trained animator, and created four films as a proof of concept. When they saw the films, they loved them instantly, and we ended up doing e films in the campaign.

The whole exercise was fantastic because of the mutual trust and the ability to work as a seamless team. The sheer volume of output in those three months is testimony to the mutual trust and respect. In less than seventy-five days, we had created over 200 commercials, 150 radio spots, and over 1000 print and outdoor creatives in every major language in India. And that the BJP won is a bonus for all who worked on the account.

One of the most beautiful things about the entire campaign was its simple language. By and large, political-party language, particularly in Hindi, is pretty heavy. The words are not what people speak. They are correct by the book, but ridiculously difficult.

All lines in this campaign were from peoplespeak — “Ab ki bar Modi Sarkar” was as simple as the brief. “Janta maaf nahin karegi” (People will not forgive) is something on the lines of what we have said or heard so many times since childhood: “Bhagwan maaf nahin karega” (God will not forgive you). Or for that matter, “Acche din aane wala hai” (Good days are around the corner). Have we not consoled friends in grief or trouble, saying, “Don’t worry, acche din aane wala hai”? Don’t all these little phrases remind you of “Chal Meri Luna”, “Thodi si pet puja, kabhi bhi, kahin bhi”, “Chutki mein chipkaye”, or many such simple lines? They do. Simple communication reaches and touches many more people — and we saw that in this campaign. Remember, every little line that you have ever spoken or heard as a child is a line that may be worth its weight in gold when you work on your next campaign.


This is an edited extract from Pandeymonium; Reprinted with permission from Penguin Books India

Pandeymonium: Piyush Pandey on advertising
Author: Piyush Pandey
Publisher: Penguin
Pages: 264
Price: Rs 799