PANDEYMONIUM
Piyush Pandey
Penguin Group
244 pages; Rs 799
There are several things Piyush Pandey could have avoided in this book. Parts of it, for example, read like a plug for clients of Oglivy & Mather, the agency he heads. It is also a little tedious to read that multinational clients are great, family-owned businesses are super (an entire chapter is devoted to why "Lala is not a four-letter word") and so on. What takes the cake is the blunt sales pitch when the author says it has been his "personal failure" that Ogilvy hasn't worked with Anand Mahindra and how "most ad agencies would give an arm and a leg to handle a piece of the Mahindra Group's business".
There are also many homilies straight out of standard management textbooks, such as "The biggest rule of our business is that great clients get great work, good clients get good work and not-so-good clients get bad work"; "A captain is as good as his team" and so on and so forth. These don't even qualify for cocktail party banter any more. The book also digresses a great deal and offers excessive details about Mr Pandey's life which reads like an ode to all his immediate family and friends.
The master storyteller comes alive only when Pandeymonium offers an insider's peek into the making of many of his iconic ads and chronicles the evolution of the Indian consumer. Who, for example, knew that in 1983, a commercial for Vicks Cough Drops starring his two-year-old niece was pulled off air because it shows her winking at her father and the rules of the time forbade a woman to wink on TV! Look at the change in mind set since then. As Mr Pandey says, imagine even 10 years ago, a Bournvita ad without a young boy in it, in a setting other than a dining table or kitchen. But in the new TVC, the Bournvita-drinking child is a daughter and the mother is helping her achieve her ambition to become a boxer.
Mr Pandey is best known for changing the striped-shirt and silk-tie culture of ad agencies and come up with ads in Hindi (recall the Asian Paints ad with the tagline har ghar kuch kehta hai) when anything non-English was considered infra-dig. His philosophy for success is simple: the ads should challenge the status quo, entertain and make consumers smile. That explains the M-Seal ad which shows water obliterating the digit 1 that preceded many zeros in the amount that the father was forced to sign as a gift to his son. The same principle was behind KFC's Finger Lickin' Good campaign that showed former Sri Lankan cricketing great Mutthiah Muralitharan licking his fingers to polish the ball before a delivery, and being transported to the memory of eating chicken at KFC.
The book makes the author's distrust of armchair research very clear by comparing researchers to musk deer who go far and wide for answers and solutions when, in all likelihood, they are right next to us. So, real research involves packing your bags, getting out of your comfort zone and stopping by roadside eateries to see what consumers are wanting or doing. That may sound simplistic but a point of view that is worth debating.
There are other words of wisdom that ad professionals and their clients may find useful. For example, he says an agency should never dismiss a product category as boring. No one can dispute that - as Mr Pandey's ad for Fevicol, an adhesive used by carpenters, proved, any category can be interesting. For clients who interfere too much in the creative process of brand campaigns, the advice is typical of
Mr Pandey. He quotes David Ogilvy as saying, "Don't keep a dog and bark yourself!" Some clients of course are at the receiving end of some pithy Pandey-speak: "You can take a horse to the water, but you can't do a thing if it wants to drink piss"!
The book makes an interesting point about the huge creative opportunity for ad agencies from the rise of alternate mediums. No longer do agencies have to fight with media planners for the additional five seconds that they need to tell a story well or tell it better. In the new media world, duration is history. Ogilvy was quick to capitalise on that - in 2013, it was the first to use Tata Sky's four-minute jailbreak commercial. The much celebrated Google reunion search and Fortune cooking oil's Do chamach dal followed.
The chapter about the campaign for the Bharatiya Janata Party in the 2014 Lok Sabha elections offers a lot of detail and only confirms the obvious: "The brief [from the party] was crystal clear. There would be only one name, Narendra Modi, in all communication, which led, unambiguously, to Ab ki baar, Modi Sarkar."
The simple message that strikes you about this book is that all of us have seen most of the things that Mr Pandey has seen in his life. But what makes him different is the perspective from which he views those things and his ability to retrieve them from his memory at will. Add passion to that and the rest is magic. The spell of that magic would have been stronger had the ad guru been able to convince his publishers to make the memoir a little shorter.
