40 years ago... And now: Shifting sands of time

The influx of high quality MBAs brought about a seismic change in the advertising agency business in India in 1970s

I started my career in advertising in 1979 but I got the first taste of advertising when I did my summer internship at an agency in Kolkata in 1978. To start with, forty years ago the advertising world was nothing like what it is today.

It was in the mid 70s that the ad agency business started seeing the influx of a new breed of professionals. Till then, advertising agencies consisted of talented artists [some like Satyajit Ray went on to become film makers of global repute], writers (like Alyque Padamsee who in addition to running a large agency also was a theatre person), statisticians who did media plans and account service personnel who could have been drawn from any profession (Air India pursers, ex Indian Navy personnel, media sales executives etc). But this changed in the mid 70s with the influx of MBAs into Indian advertising. People like Arun Nanda, Anil Kapoor, Ajit Balakrishnan were making their mark; soon they were followed by people like Pranesh Mishra, Rama Bijapurkar, Arvind Sharma, Arvind Wable, Rajiv Agarwal, Niteen Bhagwat, Rahul Kansal, Anand Halve and yours truly.

The influx of high quality MBAs, even if I say so myself, brought about a seismic change in the advertising agency business in India. Finally Indian ad agencies had the intellectual fire power to take on smart talking brand managers and marketing managers. The early entrants from the MBA ilk started rising up the ranks fast, and soon we had a flood of MBAs lining up to enter the hot agencies. In the late 70s or was it early 80s at IIMA there were more applicants to join Lintas than Hindustan Lever, according to an unconfirmed folklore.

The story is very different today and I keep getting asked why did an IIT/IIM graduate join advertising in the late 70s and not now? The simple answer was that advertising salaries were not too different from marketing salaries; and advertising agencies were positioned as 'think tanks' that challenged the brightest. There was also the added excitement of joining a start-up agency run by MBAs.

Getting back to the story of 40 years ago, the situation was very different from what it is today - right from the way advertising was created, presented, produced and released in media. To be sure, the copywriters and art directors started working together and many agencies abandoned the concept of copy department and art department. The ad was usually presented as a scribble drawn on a thin paper. The copywriter, at least the big ones, had a personal typist; some had a preferred mini Remindon Rand or Godrej typewriter. The scribble, once approved by the internal team was then made into a layout by borrowing visuals from magazines (no wonder ad agencies were big buyers of international magazines). For the very big pitch, you even made a single colour bromide known as the 'one piece bromide'. All agencies had their own 'dark room' to develop black and white prints.

Once the campaign was presented and sold, the actual creation of the ad could take a week or more. Typesetting had to be ordered and manually cut and pasted (the art studios had many different specialists; there was the cut-paste artist, the half tone retoucher who handled the photographs, the illustrator, and many more).

Before television there were the films that were shown in movie theatres. The film script was presented by a copywriter; often they had to act it out as well. Then the film production routine started ; and there were just a handful of big ad film makers in India, interestingly some of them like Prahlad Kakkar are still quite active. The film was shot in 35 mm stock; editing was done on a machine known as Steinbeck and was presented to a client as a 'double header' with the sound and visual in two different reels. You had to hire a preview theatre and show the film to the client and his team. I remember using an untrained projectionist in Bangalore who managed to tear the sound header (film) after it was shown once to the client. So we had to show the visual header again and sing out the jingle.

Sending material to media was yet another nightmare. Most newspapers were printed in letter press method, so blocks and matrices (or mats) had to be made through a special production supplier. Similarly, for movie screening, we had to send one minute reels (100 ft of film). Even television started accepting celluloid reels and then moved to UMatic tapes.

On the flip side, offices had very reliable typists and stenographers. I remember taking detailed notes at a meeting with a client; there were a series of three discussions lasting a total of six hours. I had a wonderful stenographer working with me then; I managed to convert the entire six hours of dialogue into a one long 'minutes of the meeting' that ran a full 24 pages. When I sent it to the client he was rather impressed and asked me: "Did I say all those smart things so well?"

There were no computers, no mobile phones, no STD call facilities and even fax machines were a luxury. We did not have courier services even. One basic training servicing the servicing trainees got was on how to send an urgent document to cities like Delhi, Bengaluru, and Chennai. The game was played this way: go to the airport, look for someone who appears kindhearted, request him to carry the envelope (open if you please), with a promise that your colleague at the other end will collect it the next day morning. Innumerable packages must have found their way to another city through this C2C courier network.

PCs started making their presence felt in the 90s but they did not get too many takers. We were used to working on the manual typewriters for briefs, release orders, bills etc etc etc. The PC was at best used as a more intelligent typewriter. This changed. In the beginning we had a PC shared among four executives and this then changed to one person, one PC.

Internet started entering agency offices with one dedicated machine connected to the internet. I remember a client asking a planner of ours, "Do you have internet in office? Can you download information on foods and give it to me tomorrow? I need to write an article on food marketing."

The pace of adoption of new technology leaped many stages when email became the uniform mode of communication. And the world changed forever.

Today advertising agencies all over India are working with the best the technology world can offer. Print ads are produced in-house. Films are rough edited in-house. Clients are shown layouts and even film edits by file share systems (though I am not sure if that is a good way to present work). Material is sent to publications and media houses digitally. So technically you can brief your agency at 5 pm and have the ad appearing all over India the next morning at 5 am (not an ideal way of working and that works only if you have blocked the space in media).

Advertising agencies may not continue to attract the IIT/IIM graduates, but I would say that the new breed of MBAs (and many engineers) who join advertising today are in no way inferior to the folks who came into advertising in the 70s. They too have picked an advertising career over options in marketing, sales etc. Why? I believe they are convinced that advertising offers them a career of excitement, a way to interact with the creative arts and work in a profession that is changing constantly with the influx of new digital technologies. I say, more power to them.

MG Parameswaran
Member, Management Board, FCB Ulka Advertising Group