Shyamal Majumdar: The art of connecting people

HumanKind shows why a creative agency is not just about advertising and selling products

The Ministry of Community Development in Singapore was worried when data showed that the number of marriages in the country was falling drastically. Research indicated it’s not that people didn’t want to fall in love and marry, but they were waiting for the impossible: the “perfect” person (you know, someone as financially successful as they were attractive, as generous as they were intelligent and so on).

The ministry wanted creative agency Leo Burnett to do something about it. And what did the agency’s team in Singapore do?

It created a short film called “Funeral” to drive the point home about how to celebrate families. The film shows a woman at her husband’s funeral. After a charming anecdote about her husband’s snoring, she says, “Towards the end of his life, when his illness was at its worst, these sounds indicated to me that my David was still alive. In the end, it is the small things that you remember, the little imperfections that make them perfect for you. So, to my beautiful children, I hope one day you too find yourselves partners who are as beautifully imperfect as your father was for me.”

In effect, the Singapore team of Leo Burnett was taking the cue from the agency’s mantra of “HumanKind”, which essentially means finding a human purpose for every brand and focusing on that. The man who coined the term – Tom Bernardin, chairman and CEO of Leo Burnett Worldwide – says a creative agency is about creating acts, not ads, that transform the way people think, feel and ultimately behave. “A creative agency is not about advertising and selling brands,” he says. Bernardin was recently in India for an annual review of the country’s second largest ad agency’s work.

The HumanKind idea appealed to him so much that he found time to write a book with the same name (published in the US and Canada by powerHouse Books) on the subject in association with the agency’s global chief creative officer, Mark Tutssel. The book gives readers a behind-the-scenes look at a global creative network that believes modern-day communication needs to start and end with people. “In the end, advertising agencies do not create iconic brands, people do. So it’s important to understand the human purpose of the brand,” Bernardin says.

He should know. For, Leo Burnett was the creative agency for Earth Hour, the largest mass-participation event in the world. On March 28, 2009, over a billion people in the world turned off the lights for an hour as a way of “voting” for the earth in the first-ever global “election” between the earth and global warming.

HumanKind, say the authors, breaks the routine into which the advertising industry fell during the let-the-good-times-roll years, when it was generating a need for products that only serve to placate clients, and creativity rooted in genuine human need was devalued. In its place, positioning began to masquerade as creativity.

There are many examples of how the concept of HumanKind can build a connect between a brand and its customers. For instance, you may be among the 34 million people passing through Piccadilly Circus in London every year who stood just so, with arms in the air, about 150 feet in front of the giant McDonald’s billboard and had their picture taken, which, because of the way the photo on the billboard in the background was positioned, made it look as if they were balancing a pigeon on their head or holding a bouquet of flowers or an umbrella in the air to ward off the drizzle.

Your experience with McDonald’s here doesn’t have anything to do with its burgers or fries, but something more valuable. You experienced a moment of simple, easy enjoyment and McDonald’s deepened its relationship with someone who cares enough about the brand to take a picture, create a memory and participate in the brand’s communications. McDonald’s invited you into its brand and you, in turn, invited McDonald’s into your life. The billboard wasn’t trying to actively sell anything; it was just trying to connect with you. And connect it did.

“It sounds simple, but there is extraordinary power in simplicity. It has meant changing the dialogue with even clients who are now more engaged than before in the creative process,” Bernardin says.

In India, several of the agency’s campaigns have adopted the HumanKind mantra. For example, the tag line of Tata Capital says: “Karenge wohi jo apke liye sahi (We will do only what is good for you).” The theme: it’s not just about selling a product; we will also advise you against a product of ours that is not right for you.

One of the best examples of the “human link” in Indian advertising is Cadbury. Its ads, created by O&M, play on the age-old Indian custom of making a good beginning with something sweet. Cadbury has stuck to its core brand theme, kuchch mitha ho jaye, for many years and developed sub-themes under it, the latest one being shubh arambh. A brand’s people-connect could never have been stronger.