By Prabhakar Mundkur
Last week, when Mark Pritchard of P&G said“I’d like creatives to account for three quarters of an ad agencies’ resourcesâ€,he might have delivered a telling blow to one of the mainstays of the advertising agency – the client service department. Globally and in India, creatives have been increasingly playing a more important role than any other department in delivering client satisfaction.  This is partly because the end-product of the agency is creative, so it does make sense that they are the crucial part of the delivery system.
Almost simultaneously, the quality of client service has been in steady decline. Agencies once upon a time, queued up at the IIMs in India in the late ’80s and early ’90s to compete with the global FMCG players and recruited the best young brains in the country at competitive prices with the rest of the industries. But alas, no more. I remember that JWT used to take 50-60 new recruits into the system every year. Decreasing margins and because advertising might have lost its sheen with young MBAs, ad agencies are no longer in demand on campuses today. So, it is no surprise that the quality of client service is no longer what it used to be.
But Marc Pritchard’s statements has its faults. Agencies have for too long tried to mirror the hierarchies of the client’s marketing department. This means that you need a mirror image of the brand manager, the marketing manager, the marketing director etc. in the ad agency’s client service structure. And to their credit, client service does a lot of the dirty work on the account that is often invisible but plays its part. Also, if creatives spend too much time on meetings, as clients often want them to, it is likely they will never have the time to actually do the creative. In my experience, a number of clients are operationally heavy and often client service does the dirty work ungrudgingly. But as more and more clients express their reliance on creative, client service might need to find a new reason to justify their presence on the business.
Either way, the Marc Pritchard statement is a warning bell to client service people all over the world. They need to redefine their existence and contribution on a client’s business.
India Tourism and the Land of Yoga
Incredible India rolled out its latest film positioning the country as the land of yoga. Didn’t know that? Surprised?
I am sure no one in the world really doubts that yoga was born in India although to date it does seem like our most popular export. Unfortunately, in the world of intellectual property rights, India no longer owns yoga. There are probably more yoga practitioners and yoga classes in the rest of the world than there are in India. With the UN having adopted Yoga Day, and Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s personal effort in promoting yoga, the new film does seem like a bit of wet blanket and the least impressive in the long series of Incredible India ads.
The film released on March 7, 2018 seems to be languishing at under 10k views on YouTube. No surprise.
#AllBeginsWithBlack by Raymond
This new TVC had everyone complimenting Raymond for their brave gesture of using visually impaired Canadian singer and writer Jugpreet Singh Bajwa as the hero of the film to give his interpretations of black for the new collection of fabrics. Advertising has been using differently abled people in their commercials for a while now. Bajwa recites some slam poetry which goes like this:‘Black is a like a silence that everyone can feel. When it finally speaks it deafens the world with its powerful words. It’s time to unravel.
While slam poetry might have a limited audience in India, I found the tone of the commercial very un-Raymond like. But that is perhaps because when I think of Raymond’s brand I think of their signature tune which was Traumerei from Kinderszenen Op 15 by Schumann. Languorous images of an idyllic world. Beautiful musical phrasing by Schuman. This piece of music was played by radio stations at the end of World War II. Listen to Horowitz playing it in Moscow to see how it moves you.
This commercial to me was therefore a departure from Raymond’s brand personality and the harsh tone of both the visuals and the music got me quite disturbed.
So, while the colour was about black fine fabrics, I felt there was no need to make the commercial like it belonged to the film noir genre. Because film noir is marked by a certain inherent fatalism and pessimism.  But that’s my opinion. Hope the commercial works for Raymond.