The creator of Airtel’s popular new ad campaign on the craft of advertising and why small is no longer scary.
Five minutes into our conversation Agnello Dias – one of India’s most gifted advertising wordsmiths and co-founder of the hottest independent creative shop Taproot – makes a rather philosophical statement: “When you are young, your friends are your family; but when you are old, your family becomes your friend.” Aggie – Dias’ more popular moniker among friends and the fraternity – was debriefing me on his now anthemic Airtel jingle, Har ek friend zaroori hota hai, which has got the nation humming, including me, says Arijit Barman.
But this, I have to admit, startles me since it immediately took me back to my college days when my mother used to complain about my misdirected priorities in life. Déjà vu anyone?
Aggie and I are lunching on a Friday at Busaba – a tony pan-Asian resto bar – since it seemed ideal for a long, unhurried and freewheeling conversation that I had been planning for quite some time.
Ever since I moved to Mumbai some years ago and have been hanging out with advertising friends, Aggie’s oeuvre spanning two decades, his creative genius, the winning stints at Leo Burnett and then JWT – during which he bagged every perceivable award and global recognition including India’s first Grand Prix – had become the stuff of folklore. And then, at the pinnacle of his creative success in 2008, instead of staying cocooned with a fatter pay cheque and a larger role in the global WPP joint family, he took an entrepreneurial leap of faith with Taproot. For that he regrouped with his long-time comrade and arguably the best contemporary art director Santosh Padhi, aka “Paddy”.
Like an impressionable fan, Aggie’s professional progression had me truly hooked.
The Airtel campaign got us started straight away. But Aggie’s brief was not simple. He had to define a space around youth and technology but it also had to resonate with a larger audience.
The first challenge was how to get a generation that talks with its fingertips excited.
“Have you realised that today virtual technology enables you to connect with a much larger number of friends and also helps you classify them into groups and categories in your subconscious? More importantly, you can talk to them simultaneously and need to delete them from your ever-growing contact list,” Aggie quips.
So you have friends who can be defined by the kind of content they send or by a common passion like F1 or Bollywood or who simply fit in the good old 3 a m soul-mate category. And according to the feedback from viewers who have chosen their own exclusive friend-types after the commercials hit the airwaves, the number goes up to a jaw-dropping 70,000 and still counting.
After a rather vapid new look, Airtel has finally hit a home run.
But a single line would not have been enough. Aggie needed a montage, a hit song, foot-tapping music and a film that would encompass all the different elements that he thought he would shoot separately as smaller TV spots.
“It’s a classroom set-up, so it had to be an impromptu breakout. The music had to be only from instruments found in a classroom. That means people’s bodies, raw voices, the blackboard, desk and duster, and later we even added a dustbin,” Aggie says. The film’s teen-spirit should remind you of Michael Jackson’s hit single “They don’t care about us.”
Our food starts to trickle in. We have both opted for the set lunch menu. I figure that Aggie is not a voracious foodie and even for me, for a change, the food is incidental. Our starters – Vietnamese grilled shrimp lollipops on sugarcane sticks and chicken in banana leaves, lemongrass, kafir lime and ginger soy – offer a welcome break and we both agree that the chicken, though subtler in taste, is the better of the two.
I want to know how easy or challenging it is to crack a big idea and get people excited and engrossed about it when multiple screens boggle our imagination and senses everyday. There’s television, computers and laptops and now even the mobile screen. Oh, I forgot the humble newspaper.
And also whether it is, then, that much more difficult for boutique creative agencies like Taproot that are independent of big network agencies like WPP to survive if one has to keep on offering 360-degree solutions to clients?
As our main courses are served, Aggie draws the line between advertising and advertisement. Aggie continues with a delicate palate and goes for the Thai steamed-fish in lime chili garlic, while the quintessential Bengali in me gets excited at the red coconut chicken curry in basil, peas, aubergine and jasmine rice.
Aggie goes on to explain that advertising is a way of convincing people of a point, an idea that is craft-agnostic while an advertisement is just one method of advertising. So growing up with family and friends as life’s truism, I guess would be advertising à la Airtel. “It’s like a Roald Dahl idea, one that can be translated into many languages and mediums as opposed to a P G Wodehouse one that cannot be executed in any other form.”
What about his Nike ad in which a bunch of boys break into a spontaneous cricket match on top of public buses and cars right in the middle of a jam-packed traffic intersection, I ask? “That’s an advertisement.”
Aggie is quick to add that in today’s decentralised operations, small is not necessarily scary. And the big “advertising” idea is not necessarily a big agency trademark. “You need to be both creative and clever. Advertising is not fine art,” he candidly points out. “Everybody outsources work to specialised agencies for on-ground activation, digital, events. So do we.”
This is where he goes against the media perception that Taproot is India’s Weiden+Kennedy, a hot-shop cherry picking magnum opus creative projects that pick the awards and hog the glamour while bigger agencies slog with the main line bread and butter advertising.
In defence, Aggie talks of Taproot’s innocently irreverent “Change the Game” World Cup Campaign for Pepsi. “Other than the TV commercials that we conceptualised, we were involved in radio in which we got cricketers to double up as DJs and do something quite different. For on-ground activation, we asked fans to suggest different ways to change their favourite game for the better. We even got placards made that said 3s and 5s rather than the usual 4s and 6s.”
Even the Times Of India’s cross-border peace initiative Aman ki Asha had a similar integrated approach involving multiple channels and media ranging from an award-winning film, an evocative “Love Pakistan” press ad to cultural events to trade shows and food fests. Here, too, Aggie and his team were involved right through, even for designing publicity materials and event passes. “Despite my initial apprehensions considering the polarised views centering on our two countries, in the end, the initiative became a thought leadership platform using provocation as a positive catalyst,” Aggie remembers fondly.
Aggie is quite confident that there is enough room for independent agencies like Taproot to coexist with bigger global networks like WPP or Interpublic. “Fortunately, today smaller shops have a louder voice and they are being heard since global brands are realising the need to Indianise universal emotions like love, hate and thirst. Clients, too, are willing to pay for that extra,” he says.
Nobody is complaining for sure. Clearly, no indie agency has had an impact like Taproot. Aggie and Paddy’s creative brilliance has been systematically stealing the thunder from their bigger peers, especially JWT. These two are the pied pipers wooing marquee clients like Times of India, Airtel, Pepsi or Mountain Dew away for flagship campaigns or projects.
As we get ready to leave, I had to ask him whether liberation was the only trigger for leaving the big agency platform. Aggie smiles politely and says: “I would like to be a collector of experiences. Leo Burnett was a midsize agency. JWT a worldwide giant. Did both of that for 17 years. But I didn’t want to live regretting all my life that I could have done something else, but didn’t have the guts for it. Fifty per cent of the time you make the right decision, while for the remaining 50 per cent you make the decision right.”
