The art of judgement by stealth

Nawabs, Nudes, Noodles: India Through 50 Years of Advertising

by Ambi Parameswaran

Published by Macmillan

365 pages ₹499

 

In May 1988, the day after I finished my B Com exams, I was interviewed and appointed copy trainee by Roger Pereira at the agency he started after relinquishing the top job at Shilpi, the advertising agency of the Sarabhai Group. 

The first assignment he gave me was to proofread 30 speeches given by the then doyens of the advertising world. I must have read each speech at least 100 times. No Indian practitioners wrote books about advertising then, and imported books were out of reach for me. Roger was probably being like Jackie Chan in Karate Kid, gently putting me through the wringer, knowing instinctively that I would learn best that way. That was my crash-course in advertising. 

 

Today’s freshers are lucky to have an ocean of content at their fingertips. Commentators abound, both locally and globally. Andrew Tindall, Ethan Ducker, Lakshmipathy Bhat, Karthik Subramanian, et al. There are frameworks, case studies, podcasts, awards presentations, LinkedIn pronouncements, books on creativity, effectiveness and digital marketing, and enough commentary on “the future of advertising” to keep you occupied indefinitely. But there is very little on what the business was like before you arrived. Which is one reason Ambi Parameswaran’s 10th anniversary edition of Nawabs, Nudes, Noodles, is worth reading. 

Mr Parameswaran takes us through several decades of Indian advertising with a light touch. He doesn’t try to give us a grand theory of how Indian advertising evolved. Instead, he talks about the people, campaigns, brands, and moments that helped shape it, almost anecdotally. For a young advertising person, that is probably much more useful. 

You encounter campaigns that have become part of the vocabulary of Indian advertising, but you also get some sense of how they came about. What the problem was. What somebody was trying to solve. What the agency thought. What the client thought. What the research said. What didn’t get made. What did. And, occasionally, the little accident or act of judgement that made the difference. 

Advertising history, like all history, tends to become distorted by hindsight. Once an advertisement has become famous, its success looks inevitable. We see the finished film or line or campaign and imagine that everyone involved must have known they were onto something. Of course they didn’t. Most good advertising probably looked fairly uncertain before it became good advertising. 

Mr Parameswaran’s anecdotes bring some of that uncertainty back. They remind you that there are people, arguments, compromises, dead ends and acts of courage behind things that eventually look obvious. That is a more realistic education in advertising than a collection of award-winning case studies. 

The book also gives you a sense of how far Indian advertising has travelled. 

Think about the India in which some of these campaigns were created. A much smaller media universe. A very different consumer economy. Fewer brands. Fewer channels. Less research. Less data. Far less technology. And yet some of the work produced then remains memorable. We now have access to vastly more information about consumers. We can target people with extraordinary precision. We can test, optimise and retarget. We can put communication in front of precisely the people we believe should see it. And still, somehow, it is possible to make advertising that nobody remembers. 

Judgement is a tough thing to teach. You acquire it partly by doing the work and partly by seeing enough work to recognise patterns. You learn what a strong idea feels like. You learn when research is illuminating and when it is simply giving everyone permission to avoid making a decision. 

This is perhaps the most useful thing the book does: It gives you an education in judgement by stealth. 

The new edition makes the exercise more interesting because Mr Parameswaran has added the decade from 2015 to 2025. That is the period today’s young advertisers are entering, and it has been transformed by digital, social platforms, creators and influencers, changing attitudes to representation, and now generative artificial intelligence. 

The temptation is to regard this as an entirely new business. But read against the preceding chapters, the continuity is striking. The technology has changed. Most of those questions haven’t.  

One of the disadvantages of entering advertising today is that you can become very good at the current version of the business without knowing much about the business itself. You can know every platform and still know very little about brands. You can know how to make content and still not know what makes an idea travel. You can know how to optimise a campaign and still not know why anyone should remember it. You can be completely fluent in the present and almost entirely ignorant of the past. This book is a reasonably painless cure for that condition. In sum, no matter what your lifestage, if you care about advertising, this is a book you should snack on every day.

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The reviewer is former chief marketing officer of Kotak Mahindra Group

Disclosures: Entities controlled by the Kotak family have a significant holding in Business Standard Pvt Ltd

Ambi Parameswaran is a Business Standard columnist