 "40 years ago...and now: Calcutta shaped ad mentoring")
JWT was then known as HTA (Hindustan Thompson Associates), McCann tied up with Clarion (formed by the Indian employees of an erstwhile British agency) and DJ Keymar was yet to become Ogilvy & Mather.
The collective client roster read something like this: ITC (around 16 brands such as Wills, Gold Flake in cigarettes alone), HLL (HUL now, with Brooke Bond, Lipton), Shaw Wallace, Bata (one of HTA's largest clients), Reckitt Benckiser (Cherry Blossom, Robin Blue), Eveready, HMV (later acquired by RPG), Philips, Britannia, Dunlop, Exide and Emami among others.
Madhukar Kamath, group CEO and MD, DDB Mudra Group, who worked as an account executive at Clarion-McCann in mid-70-early-80s, says, "I was fortunate to have worked in Calcutta then. It was the largest hub in advertising, and Bombay played second fiddle. The top two agencies, HTA and Clarion, were based in Calcutta." Rohit Ohri, executive chairman, Dentsu India & CEO Dentsu Asia Pacific (South), who was with Response India and HTA in late-80-early-90s, recalls how ITC spread its business across three agencies, HTA, Clarion and Lintas, and Calcutta being an important market till the early-90s.
Prem Mehta, erstwhile CMD, Lintas Group, who worked in Mumbai then, says that current hubs like Delhi and Bangalore were nowhere comparable, and Chennai was still small.
In HTA's Bondel Road office in south Calcutta sat the doyen of Calcutta advertising, Subhas Ghoshal. He created his next line of command with the likes of Ram Ray and Sundar (or Dhritiman, the theatre and film veteran) Chatterjee. There was also others like Prasanta Sanyal, Sarbajit Ray, Shiben Dutt (Wills Made for Each Other), Subrata Sen Gupta, Tara Sinha, Sachi Mukherjee and Dilip Sen. Sujit Sanyal, who recounted his days in Clarion in the book Life In A Rectangle..., says that in the 70-80s, "real and serious advertising" was done in Calcutta because of such leaders. The inimitable Satyajit Ray who was in advertising in the mid-40s would visit Clarion once a year as a member of its board. It was a time when creative directors still ran the show.
Mentoring was second-nature to the ad fraternity. Sanyal says, "Calcutta was the biggest groomer of talent upto the 80s." At a time when text was mostly dictated to a typist pool, a record of the day's work (right from memos to creatives) would land up at the bosses' table every day. Ghoshal and Ray are said to have spent two-three hours jotting down feedback on each, as Kaushik Roy, president, brand strategy & marketing communication, Reliance Industries, who moved from creative to client servicing within HTA between 1979 and 1990, recalls. Ohri says, "I got a note from Ram saying, 'You used 643 words but you could have said the same in 242 words.'" A bustling and the country's first ad club, of which Sanyal later served as secretary-general, kept alive a dialogue between advertisers and the fraternity.
What were the creatives like
Namita Roy Ghose, film director, White Light Moving Picture Company, who was part of the legendary team at HTA headed by Chatterjee, says that it was a time when clients were waking up to positioning brands rather than parade product attributes for a generic communication. She says, "Brooke Bond's many sub-brands in tea began to address different target audience, for example." She launched the Red Label Special, portraying the wife as a special woman, that made waves.
Mehta says that even though the 70s marked a shortage in a lot many consumer goods, advertisers of tyres (Ceat), cigarettes and paint (Jenson and Nicholson, Berger) advertised heavily.
Advertisers from other cities would flock to Calcutta. Kamath says, "Nestle came from Delhi for the national launch of Nescafe by Clarion," referring to the 'Come Alive' campaign. The scene buzzed with work on competing brands such as Lipton (Clarion) and Brooke Bond (HTA), Sanyal points out.
In 1975, an Exide battery variant was positioned as the 'Fifth source of energy' (after coal, petroleum and natural gas, nuclear, renewables) and Chloride India (the parent) accepted it as its international campaign, "it came out of Mirza Ghalib Street (Clarion's office)," says Sanyal.
Regional puns
Subhash Kamath, managing partner, BBH India, who worked in Trikaya Grey in servicing, and later visited the city as CEO of Bates in 1989-2000s, says, "A lot of the Bengali work was superb. Rituparno Ghosh (the late film director and artiste) was then in Response (agency floated by Ram Ray) and was one of the finest Bengali copy-writers, working on Boroline." He rues that while campaigns were brilliant in the local language, some were difficult to apply to other parts of India. "Applaud on the national stage eluded it as a result." Trikaya Grey's campaign for Bata sandals saw Rohit Chawla, the renowned photographer, click poignant black and white shots of someone jumping on-board a bus, alighting from a hand-pulled rickshaw after shopping for fish or resting in the Maidan, in which the sandals were a fixture. The tagline said, 'Hata manei Bata' (Walking means Bata) but when asked to be taken national, the impact was lost in translation.
Roy says Kwality ice-cream's ad saying 'Mukhe dile gole jay, ahare ki pushti' (melts in the mouth, such wholesome food) was a sterling example of how product positioning and puns went hand in hand. 'Ahare' conveyed the twin meanings of food and adulation. "It was a client for whom we could have easily done an English campaign," says Roy, adding that creative chiefs such as Chatterjee had an innate sense of strategy, and hence, positioning was built in.
Clients' ethos
Roy says, "ITC once rescued the agency when it was running low on finances". Sanyal says, "The clients looked after us as if we were part of their own companies. Once Dunlop asked us to raise our billing by Rs 7 lakh, the amount from the previous year that we did not charge because there were no fresh creatives." Roy Ghose says the trust of the clients at that time would be hard to come by today: "J Narayan or Nari of ITC would approve of a film idea based on a five-minute conversation." Sanyal recalls, some clients would even pay for the occassional pitch, such as Dunlop which paid Rs 10,000, in 1972, to each agency in contention, footing their pitch cost. The senior agency hands would easily be seen at the head of the client's table, talking about strategy as a partner and not as a vendor, says Subhash Kamath.
Brain drain
But two factor dealt crippling blows to the industry. One, cigarette brands, a large part of the clientele, had to stop advertising and two, the economic and political environment resulted in a lot of businesses shifting out of the city. Even ITC operates its FMCG and food business out of Bangalore, while others mostly moved to Mumbai and Delhi. Large agencies could no more justify a full-fledged office in the city. By the early 90s, 80 per cent of the top talent was already pulled out to other branches. The buzz fully shifted to the island city of Mumbai.
An earlier version of this article mentioned Raghu Rai as the photographer of the Bata campaign when in fact it was Rohit Chawla. The error is regretted.