Happydent Palace on Gunn Report's 20 ads of century

Voters from around the world chose from a list of 30

After the Padma award earlier this year, Prasoon Joshi, chairman, Asia-Pacific, and chief executive and creative officer, McCann Worldgroup India, has reason to celebrate again. Joshi's Happydent Palace commercial, created in 2006, featured in the top 20 list of the best advertisements of the current century by the Gunn Report.

The latter is considered a creative barometer in the advertising world.

Happydent, however, is the only Indian entry in a list otherwise dominated by advertising majors such as Weiden & Kennedy, Saatchi & Saatchi and BBDO. The London, Paris, Melbourne, US offices, among others, of these agencies have figured on the list.

The winners, after a worldwide poll, were selected from a list of 30 candidates. "What is heartening is that not only Indians, but also globally Happydent resonated with people," Joshi said over telephone.

Happydent remains one of the most technically brilliant commercially, coming out of the Indian sub-continent in the recent years, sectoral experts said. The reason is simple: The ad was predicated on the idea that Happydent chewing gum could make your teeth white.

Joshi says that a simple rendition of this idea would have made the commercial look trite. "There was need for a quirky but interesting twist to this," he said.

It was Joshi who came up with the idea of using "human lamps", an extension of an idea he had used in a previous commercial for Happydent.

"Around the time, we were thinking of this commercial, there was another Happydent ad that had done very well in the market. It was a photographer, who uses his assistant's sparkling white teeth as a flashbulb. The Happydent Palace ad borrows from this idea - of sparkling white teeth acting as a source of light - but the rendition is completely different. I created this fantastical world, where everything is illuminated by these human lamps, men, who have sparkling white teeth by chewing Happydent gum," Joshi added.

The ad was shot by ad film-maker Ram Madhwani of city-based Equinox Films, who Joshi says, put enormous effort to understand what he wished to communicate. "This was an ad that saw a lot of collaboration coming from different quarters, from the film-maker to the editor. I was involved in the music as well. In that sense, it was a collaborative effort," he says.

The story goes that the ad was shot in only eight days at Panvel, outside Mumbai, using around 20 traditional acrobats from Maharashtra and Kerala. Special sets were erected just for the film, one over a river, helping the milieu seem believable, Joshi said.