My favourite campaign is Google India's 'Reunion': Prahlad Kakar

Which do you consider your favourite campaign and why?
 

My favourite television campaign is the Google India campaign from 2013 which featured Reunion and other films. I choose it because it’s a human interest campaign, one which is about people and their emotions and it’s real and tangible. It touches people’s lives and changes their perception. So that is why there is a sense of permanency about the campaign. It affects you. The Reunion is the one where an old refugee from Karachi who comes to Delhi and is missing his friend based in Karachi. His granddaughter finds the friend on Google and gets him to come for his birthday. Then there is one about an old man who is the first voter of this country and is now 90-odd and is still voting. He thinks it’s very important to vote and he is up in Himachal somewhere. He thinks it’s very important to vote and he is up in Himachal somewhere.  There are quite a few of them which are exceptional and as a campaign, it was very powerful. 

What was the key takeaway from the campaign?

The key idea was that Google enables you to tell stories about unique people who would be lost otherwise. Without Google, it would be almost impossible to find relatives or friends who are separated, people who are isolated in little village and the like. Those stories should come alive so the country also knows about these people and sets examples by them. 

MY TAKE: If a client could make a movie, why would he sit behind a desk and try to make the product instead? -Prahlad Kakar, Ad film maker

Do you remember the campaign winning any advertising award(s)? Do you think advertising awards serve any purpose?

The purpose was to reward people who created the advertisements but now awards have become purposeless because the agencies take the award and never give it to the creatives. Now you get to hear “X and Y creative team”. What does that mean? This is because they are insecure, they feel that if a young person wins an award for a brand, he or she might get poached by someone else. So, instead of securing the position for the youngster, empowering him and telling him this is where you grow and give them a plan for that, they deny the credit. You are obviously not creating the right environment for him to stay.

Was there something else that could have been done to make the campaign better?

I don’t think anything could have been done to make the campaign better. Google has the confidence to be able to pick its directors and let them run with the idea without any helicopter surveillance from the client. 

Is less interference from the client the ideal scenario... always?

The client is very important in the quality of communication. For a creative person, two and two is not always four, he aims for 22. If the client recognises a professional and leaves the responsibility with him, the professional will carry the responsibility well to excel. But if you don’t have the confidence in yourself or the executor, you will then want to know everything that is going on. That will kill the spontaneity of that communication because it will become something like the minutes of a meeting.  

A good director takes the responsibility of delivering a product which is far better than what the client expects but there is a risk. A client can come back and say that the ad film was not according to the storyboard that was agreed on and might be nitpicking even if broadly, the product is according to the storyboard. The story remains the same but the director’s approach and vision can be different. That might make the clients insecure at times and then they start to fiddle around with the purity of the story. We have to remember that if a client could make a movie, why would he sit behind a desk and try to make the product instead.