Tale of two ad campaigns

A war room and round-the-clock updates ensured that BJP's media campaign decimated Congress'

The creative chops of Piyush Pandey of Ogilvy & Mather and Prasoon Joshi of McCann-Worldgroup had the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) spoilt for choice. At one point, the core communication team, comprising BJP MP Piyush Goyal, debated long over whether to take Joshi’s ‘Desh ki pukar, Modi sarkar’ or Pandey’s ‘Abki bar Modi sarkar’, as the tagline. But choice was not the only feature that helped Narendra Modi of BJP outwit Rahul Gandhi of the Indian National Congress. At work for the 63-year-old Modi was the textbook marketing style of complete focus on the goal — the voter, in this case.

In the process, Modi alongwith his army of supporters rewrote the rules of election canvassing. As Anuraag Khandelwal, executive creative director and head, Soho Square, the WPP agency on the three-month-long advertising campaign around Modi, says, “We were clear from the start that we wanted to be simple in our communication. That was the feedback we got from Mr Modi and his team, who would quickly come back to us on the creatives we presented. From creating the central campaign to focus on core issues like corruption, good governance, development and women’s safety to providing solutions to give  hope through Acche Din Aane Wale Hain, we never lost sight of the purpose, that the attention had to be on one man.”

Prasoon Joshi, president, South Asia, McCann Worldgroup, whose second agency TAG, also worked on the campaign says, “While we were the sounding boards on most of the tactical ideas on inflation, security and other contextual issues, we were tasked with crafting the philosophical voice. Hence, the anthem, Saugandh in which Mr Modi himself featured. The language and the imagery were all geared to answer the call of the land to move forward. The clarity of vision helped. We had to believe in the product, take cognisance of the realities, and chalk out his strengths.”

Ad gurus hail this single-minded approach. Says K V Sridhar, chief creative officer, India, SapientNitro. “Brand-building is about relentlessly driving home a brand promise. The message in this case was Modi for PM, and the promise was good leadership and administration. And at no given point in time did his team deviate from this brief. Unlike in the past, he also used professional agencies to conceptualise and execute this campaign. It had to be a success.”

In 2004, Sridhar, then with the Leo Burnett Group, was the architect of the Congress’s answer to BJP’s much-hyped ‘India Shining’ campaign —Aam admi ko kya mila — addressing inflation and the attack on Parliament. Congress managed to connect with the masses, which it replicated in 2009 with Aam admi ke badte kadam and the anthem Jai Ho. So what went wrong in 2014?

Pranesh Misra, chairman & MD, Brandscapes Worldwide, says, “The Congress quite simply failed to deliver. They were in government, so the odds were stacked against incumbency. But there was no clarity on who was the leader as Rahul Gandhi appeared reluctant and confused. There was no slogan. There were going from one ad to another. The lines in these ads were long and too conceptual. They weren’t communicating anything.”

In contrast, Modi’s marketing machinery was constantly fed with feedback from a research team that was hard at work across the country. Piyush Pandey, executive chairman & national creative director, O&M, who supported Soho Square’s efforts, says, “The entire thinking was based on research that BJP had done on how people were looking forward to better days. The challenges were in terms of delivery. We had to make it specific to regions. Often we had to do this overnight. Even at 3-am, I could call up BJP’s office to get a film released. They too worked round-the-clock, otherwise such a campaign would have been hard to pull off.”

Sam Balsara, CMD of Madison World, which held the media plan together, says, “We had to adjust our working days from to a 12am-3am cycle. Suggestions about tweaking the message, say for Indore or Varanasi, would come from the respective BJP state office in to the BJP Delhi headquarter, and then we would change the material and release orders in the middle of the night. Our crack-team operated out of a war-room in BJP’s Lodhi Colony office. The entire media plan was constituency-based.”

Joshi says that the other challenge was to let go of creative egos and be open to suggestions when working on a project like this, and added that the BJP core team coordinated the different agencies very well.