Why 2024 should be the year of breaking conformity in the ad industry?

Here’s a question I want to ask you. 

Can you name some of the most iconic brand campaigns you have seen come out from India in the last 30 years? Chances are you are most likely going to talk about iconic ads from brands like Pidilite, Cadbury, Vodafone (Zoo Zoos), Bajaj, Imperial Blue, Amul, Asian Paints, Happydent, etc. 

Countless ads will come to your mind, and the list still won’t be exhaustive. 

Now, think about the last five years. Can you easily recall recent iconic campaigns? It's a bit trickier, right? The answer may not come to you as instantly as it did during the previous question. In the previous question, you may have struggled to choose from a volley of iconic campaigns. But if you narrow it down to the last five years, you may find it difficult to even recollect any campaigns. 

Don’t worry, you are not alone. 

In a recent survey conducted through a Google form I had floated, almost 100 respondents had trouble remembering standouts, hinting at a potential dip in memorable advertising.

However, here are some standouts, which even you may recollect after considerable thought: 

• Cadbury’s Not Just A Cadbury ad. 
• Cadbury’s Flip The Gender Narrative remake of a previous iconic ad with the girl playing cricket and the boy cheering for her. 
• Cadbury’s Nothing Coin for 5 Star. 
• Cred ads (polarizing opinion there, but sure, let’s count it) 
• Zomato vs. Zomaato. 

I feel these results may not be very appealing, given the fact that we are living in times when there are more brands than ever, there is more talent than ever, and there is more and more capital deployed in terms of ad spends than ever before. 

Isn’t it just a bit sad that only one brand consistently stands out in terms of making memorable campaigns in the last five years? If you take the 30-year perspective, there might be 10. 

A compelling answer given by ad professionals as to whether they felt creativity has declined in the industry. More than 50% felt that the answer was yes, and more than 30% said maybe. 

So, why is this happening? 

In strictly my personal opinion, I feel a lot of this has to do with the MBAisation of marketing in general, where the industry seems to be playing it safe rather than taking creative risks. 

And this is not just a recent phenomenon but has been existing since time immemorial. 

If you look carefully, some of the best advertising throughout history has been done by so-called Lala or traditional companies. Whether it is Pidilite, Asian Paints, Fortune Oil, Amul, Titan, Bajaj or Raymond, they have all made an active effort to appeal to Indian sentiments on a deeper level and respect the consumer’s sensibilities, above all. 

Another common element among these brands is that they have very rarely used celebrities in their advertising. 

Incidentally, the owner of Asian Paints famously rejected an admission in IIM-A and chose to do some work on the ground instead. 

Even the not-so-creative but catchy work done by brands like Nirma, Vicco Turmeric and Ujala have great recall and nostalgia value today. Contrastingly, multinational corporations introduced formulaic approaches, leveraging celebrities and emerging technologies. Using a celebrity was new until every brand started doing it. In today’s times, using AI was new until every brand started doing it. Even using CGI was new until every brand started doing it. 

In my opinion, over time, brands seem to have lost their appetite for risk-taking, resorting to convenient marketing strategies, which has been responsible for the death of creative instinct on both, the brand and the agency sides. We have now reached a stage where the idea is to ape success than to create it. 

This is not to say there weren’t outliers in the MNC space. Cadbury, Nestle, Hutch/Vodafone, Google, HUL, etc. have done some fantastic advertising on some of their brands. 

At the same time, not all Lala/traditional companies have given us great ads. Tata Nano was admittedly a marketing failure. I don’t remember seeing many good ads from Reliance as a group, except for a select few brands. Bisleri wasted precious talent and money by creating a banal ad starring Deepika Padukone recently. 

So, whether the brand is Lala or MNC, chances are that if their advertising was/is good, there is most likely a powerful creative voice that stands out as a common thread behind those brands whose instincts and ideas are actively supported by the management. 

Piyush Pandey made waves in the advertising world by taking a stick, coating it with Fevikwik, and affixing it to a 5-rupee coin in a water-filled beaker when he was told that Fevikwik may not work underwater. It took a man with gumption, backed by a team willing to embrace the possibility of being proven wrong, to craft this now-iconic ad.

In more recent times, we have seen a brand like Zomato being consistently true to their own unique voice despite their own ups and downs. 

Even if their risks took a wrong turn sometimes, like it did with the infamous “MC-BC” ad, they were effortlessly light and cheeky even in dusting themselves off and getting back up again. 

Just for the record, Akshar wasn’t fired and continued to steer the brand to new heights even after this controversy. 

But wait, what has MBA got to do with this? 

Examine the job listings for roles such as brand manager, marketing head, or digital marketing managers in many companies, and you're likely to find a common trend: a requirement for an MBA from a top Tier-1 institution. 

What this has done is fill the room with like-minded, equally qualified, and similarly educated individuals with a lot of theoretical knowledge but very little practical experience and connect with the masses, in my opinion. This perspective isn't a newfound revelation but has evolved over a decade of hands-on experience working with brands across categories, including FMCG, entertainment, finance, automobiles, pharma, beauty, and more.

The digital boom has done the same to marketers as it has to overall humanity. Phones have become smarter and people have become dumber. In the same vein, tech has become smarter, but marketers, overwhelmed by a multitude of channels, have made dumb choices of what to do with that tech. 

The result? We have a bunch of marketers chasing vanity metrics to attain nirvana in the form of virality even if that means aping something that has already become viral once and has lost the novelty factor that made it viral in the first place. This has led to a homogenised marketing landscape that lacks diversity and originality.

The marketing team is now busy mimicking the algorithms of social media. This contributes to the shaping of your narrative and constructs a comfortable echo chamber, fostering a misleading sense of intellectual superiority. You go from exploring an answer to a question to forming a damaging belief system in no time. 

Don’t believe me? 

Just try this as an experiment. 

Try writing something like “Why are men so toxic?” in your Google search or something. 

In no time, you will start getting reels and shorts that bash men, ads that will sell books that bash men, and recommended content from creators who bash men. 

Hopefully, the disabling of third-party cookies by Google may help in the longer term, but generally, this illustrates the typical functioning of social media. It seems acceptable to validate the most vain thoughts as long as it grabs your attention. 

It’s because of this convenient echo chamber that we are witnessing a sea of sameness across brands today. And it is in situations like these, that a powerful creative voice comes in like a true friend and dares to challenge your beliefs. 

So, why should 2024 be the year of creative diversity? 

Yeah, I know. 

This was almost like an agency pitch. It took me a lot of build-up to get to the damn point. 

However, the short answer to this would be that a true creative voice will call you out on your BS. To elaborate, the creatives will drive you insane but will keep you safe from doing something safe. 

You know, I have been working in advertising for about a decade. I can’t tell you the number of times a young junior creative from my team may have asked me a question that has given me sleepless nights and would have led me to rethink an entire campaign. 

I can’t tell you the number of times when an idea that was just good has been elevated to become great by ad film directors I have worked with, who infused their vision into our scripts. 

I can’t tell you how a sudden improvisation by an actor on set has become the main talking point of the ad and has turned into a meme organically. 

I can’t tell you how a small tweak to a line has changed the course of an entire brand. 

What I can tell you, for sure, is that it won’t make logical sense initially. But if you back a genuinely good idea, it will all start making sense eventually. 

Probably, a creative who also is a musician on the side will help you sell chocolates by showing a gorilla playing drums like it did for Cadbury. A creative with entrepreneurial instincts will help you invent your own category instead of competing with major behemoths by calling it Schezwan “chutney” instead of Schezwan “sauce” as it did for Ching’s Secret. (There weren’t many takers for Ajay Gupta’s idea at the beginning, but he eventually saw a successful acquisition of Capital Foods with Tata Consumer Products) 

A creative who loves attending music concerts may probably even help you make something as boring as packaged drinking water cool by branding it as “Liquid Death”, a way to murder your thirst. 

All you have to do is invest your time, money and effort into making sure that this creative person is identified and respectfully given a seat at the table. It doesn’t matter if the creative person is from the agency or a part of the in-house team, the partnership has to be followed in spirit and not just on paper.  

Ultimately, the voice of your brand deserves to have a voice in the boardroom, no matter how inconvenient and uncomfortable that would be for your MBAs. 

As for your MBAs, I just have one ad that captures my sentiment for them: 

This article is penned by Jay Morzaria, Former Head of Creative at Rephrase.ai & Instructor at TTT Academy.

Disclaimer: The article features the opinion of the author and does not necessarily reflect the stance of the publication.