My favourite campaign is a Camay soap commercial from 70s: K V Sridhar Pops

Which is your favourite campaign and why?

My favourite campaign is from the mid or late 1970s. It was a commercial for Camay soap in the US markets. Television broadcast was at a nascent stage in India with no commercials featuring here. I was a young advertising professional back then and our agency used to get low-band video tapes to show us successful commercials being run in other markets and that’s how I got to see it.

The (Camay) commercial features an old man as a storekeeper and an old woman comes to buy something at his shop. She asks him what’s new and he responds by telling her about a new soap “which is very good for your skin”. He takes a soap bar into a washbasin, makes some lather and puts some of the later into her hands and tells her that it was a smoother version of the old Camay soap. You can see the affection between the two has been captured in a beautiful way and I am yet to see something as emotional as that.  

On what parameters did you base your decision?

Those were my early days and most of the advertisements I saw were very rational. So in that period, it was hard to imagine that in 30-40 seconds you can tell such a beautiful emotional story. Had they selected young people, it would have been a cliché and that was the norm — young glamorous people being featured in ads. So here was an ad which was classic for the era and remains so. For someone as young and impressionable as I was back in the day, it was a different experience altogether.  

What do you think was the key idea the campaign was trying to drive home?

It was trying to deliver a simple message — it was good enough for anyone if it was good enough for old people.  

K V Sridhar Pops Founder & chief creative officer, HyperCollective

Do you remember the campaign winning any advertising awards? Do you think these awards serve any purpose?

For such ads, public recognition is the biggest award. I may not be able to recall but it did win some international awards and there are very few Camay commercials which have actually won awards. Now coming to the second part of the question, awards used to serve a certain purpose in the past but now I am not very sure.

Why do you feel that way?

See, there was a time when we used to create great advertising which was awarded and rewarded at the end of the year. But now people are creating advertising for awards. In the past 10 to 15 years with globalisation coming in, holding companies are putting pressure on the Indian arms to be the most creative in their market with revenues in mind. We used to work without these pressures and be more creative. So, you have fewer memorable ads these days and every ad looks similar. When things become so transactional, creativity suffers.

Sometimes, because of the emotional element in a campaign, there is greater recall for the story than the product or service advertised. Do you feel this was the case with the campaign we are discussing?

The Camay ad weaved a product demonstration so beautifully in a story that you didn’t feel you were looking at an advertisement. It was as if you saw it happen in front of you, like your grandfather falling in love which is beautiful.

Did this campaign inspire any of your work?

It certainly inspired my work as most of the stories I told were either very emotional or had subtle humour in them — nothing over the top, be it HDFC’s “sar utha ke jiyo” or Saint Gobain or the Maaza commercials.