ADVERTISING: Delhi-based Crayons pips others to bag the Congress account
Lalani has good reason to feel excited: He beat eight other agencies including bigwigs like JWT, Mudra, Euro RSCG and Rediffusion last week for the Congress account for the next general elections slated for some time early-2009.
Agency circles expect the party to spend up to Rs 150 crore in the run up to the elections. This is the biggest deal the small all-Indian Delhi-based agency has ever landed in the 22 years it has been around. And given the current squeeze on ad budgets, many an ad honcho would have given his left arm for the business.
They can still try for the other parties. All told, political parties are expected to spend close to Rs 500 crore on advertising and communication in the next general elections. But none will have a budget as large as the Congress. The incumbent’s budget is always the highest, ad industry sources will tell you. Once done for purely prestige and string-pulling, political advertising is now big business.
Lalani is no stranger to the world of political advertising. He was amongst the first to realise in the late-1990s that politicians require help from specialists to reach out to voters with very different socio-economic profiles. One campaign cannot connect with all categories of voters.
Crayons first did some work for the Bharatiya Janata Party in the 1999 general elections. Its big break came in 2003 when it designed and executed the campaign for the party in the Rajasthan elections. It was a tough challenge, simply because BJP’s candidate for chief minister, Vasundhara Raje, was a rank outsider. Yet, the party won the election and Raje became the chief minister.
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After that, BJP signed Crayons for the 2004 general elections, when it was voted out of power. Next was the Punjab state assembly election where Crayons worked for the Akali Dal which replaced the Congress government and came to power.
“Our work was noticed,” says Lalani. It is learnt that in their internal confabulations, senior party leaders from Rajasthan as well as Punjab spoke in favour of Crayons. That it had worked only for arch rival BJP and its ally (Akali Dal) was not held against it.
Lalani feels the work his agency does for Congress will mitigate the perception that it is close to the BJP. “The BJP stigma does hurt sometime. At various places we were branded as a BJP agency,” says Lalani. Still, that didn’t keep Crayons from bagging the Incredible India campaign of the tourism ministry recently for the whole of Europe.
According to brand specialist Harish Bijoor, the mainstay of any political campaign remains the idea: “An agency does not need to be big as long as it has presented the right idea. If the idea appeals to the marketing managers of a political party, the account is yours.”
Ad industry executives say handling the account of a party helps in many ways once it comes to power — agencies get hired by departments and public sector undertakings. Lalani says it helps in a limited way. “We have had mixed results in Rajasthan. While we got more business from some departments, the work we have done for Rajasthan Tourism has actually come down,” says he.
Lalani has his finger in several pies. The Marwari Lalani family is into automobile components and plastics. He owns a lounge bar called Kuki in New Delhi, operates an air-charter and runs radio cab services with around 1,000 cars under the brand Mega Cabs in Delhi, Mumbai and Chandigarh. “In the next 3-4 years, I want to become the largest radio cab services company with 20,000 taxis,” says Lalani.
At the moment, the big thing for him is the Congress account. Lalani is in talks with Congress leaders to get an idea of what they want and who will be his minder. Still, he has his plans ready. “A dipstick showed that the Aam Aadmi (common man) connect of the Congress is very positive. So we will expand on it,” says he, adding: “The promise will be how we will improve his life in the next five years. The nuclear energy programme will also be linked to the Aam Aadmi.”
According to Mudra Communications President Sandeep Vij, the agency will have three challenges: Figure out the short-term benefits of the nuclear deal, identify the leader who can symbolise the Congress and understand the nuances of regional politics.
The campaign will cut across mediums. Lalani is quick to rattle off numbers: “Out of the 55 million Internet users in India, 40 million are first-or second-time voters. The possibilities are huge.” The campaign is likely to extend to the 290 million cellular phone users in the country too.
The first ads are expected to roll out by Diwali later this month. Lalani says he has to put together a special team for the account. Time is short and he will have to move fast.