Anil Kapoor, Chairman Emeritus, FCB Ulka, passed away in Mumbai on Monday after a prolonged illness.
A little about Kapoor from our archives and courtesy the Ulka website: His love for challenges saw him taking charge of Draftfcb+Ulka (Ulka Advertising, at the time), turning it into the fastest growing agency in India and taking its rightful place as one of the ‘Big Five’. With the formation of Draftfcb in 2006, Mr Kapoor was appointed as Draftfcb President with responsibility for Asia-Pacific region and Africa.
He was appointed Chairman Emeritus of Draftfcb + Ulka, after a 22-year stint with the company and its other associated agencies. As one who is known to make things happen, his role expanded naturally into industry bodies. He is a Past President of the Advertising Agencies Association of India (AAAI), the Chairman of the Audit Bureau of Circulation of 2007-08 and was also on the Management Board of the National Readership Survey and the Television Audience Measurement Research. He was also on the Editorial Advisory Board of The Economic Times. In May 2002, Mr Kapoor was also inducted into the Foote, Cone & Belding’s Worldwide Board.
Before joining Draftfcb+Ulka Kapoor was with the Boots Company, India, for 14 years, where, as the Marketing Director, he launched a string of brands, all of which went on to become No. 1 in their markets. At Boots, he also set up two field forces, one for consumer products and the other for ethical pharmaceutical products. Before that, he was with the legendary agency MCM and though not the cause, he says he had to preside over its closure – quite a learning experience! Kapoor grew up in Delhi and graduated with a BA in English Literature from St. Stephen’s College, Delhi and then did his MBA from the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad.
When we spoke with some of his closest aides from Ulka (and even earlier), most felt too devastated to share a long tribute. While we were able to catch a quote from veteran adperson Nagesh Alai, the quotes from Ambi Parameswaran and Shashi Sinha are from an article we had done in September 2013 when Kapoor was felicitated with the Lifetime Achievement Award by the Advertising Agencies Association of India.
Nagesh Alai
Veteran adperson, business advisor and columnist
A vision of purpose and a mission of execution was the hallmark of a man called Anil Kapoor. A huge banyan tree under whom everybody flourished. Quite simply, Ulka shone brighter because of his effulgence. A true leader who will be sorely missed by legions of people and brands. The advertising and marketing fraternity have lost a doyen…. Anil was a wonderful persona of a tough exterior and a soft interior who would go out of the way to help people close to him. He was a mentor par excellence. A void difficult to fill.
Shashi Sinha
CEO, IPG Mediabrands and Lodestar UM
They don’t make people like Anil Kapoor these days.
I have had the good pleasure of working with Draftfcb+Ulka a few years before he joined the agency from a strong client background. In fact that possibly ensured that he was very focused on deliveries. As someone who helmed the agency for many years and even now as Chairman Emeritus, we and our clients included have always known him to be a no-nonsense man. Forthright, never into any frivolous conversation. He was always focused on the task on hand.
He had a keen eye on the business and would actively engage with all his clients. Â Even now when some of us meet him, his observations are pertinent to the business and may I say: bang-on. Anil Kapoor has always been an excellent people manager considering his team has been together for so long.
I have always had an excellent rapport with him and have found in him a Guru whom I admire and respect.
Ambi Parameswaran
Veteran adperson, author and columnist
I have worked with Anil Kapoor for over two decades and I have seen him in various roles, as Head of Marketing of a large British multinational, as a CEO of a pioneering media company and as a CEO of a struggling ad agency. One thing that defines him is his ‘Never Say Die’ attitude. When he joined Ulka no one thought he had a chance of saving an agency that was fast sinking. In fact someone who is revered in advertising world even told me that I was mad to join Anil Kapoor in his mission of saving an ailing Indian agency. Anil proved all his detractors wrong though his passion, attitude and commitment to the cause. He also showed the industry how to build a strong team and keep it together for two decades. How to build an agency group entirely from within, and without the help of international experts and hand-me-down accounts. He demonstrated how to partner clients at senior levels to launch one successful brand after another, Â in tough market conditions. As Ulka became FCB Ulka and later DraftFCB Ulka, his managerial and leadership skills got recognized on the global stage, many times over.
Anil Kapoor, who was seen as an outsider in the Industry, was soon accepted as an equal and may be as a ‘more than an equal’. He went on to play leadership role in various industry bodies such as AAAI and ABC. He was instrumental in setting up the independent NRS survey in the mid-’90s. He also played a very vital role in helping the formation of IBF as a body that could work with AAAI to create norms and processes on how agencies work with television.
We don’t have too many people in advertising industry today who can fill his shoes.
Rejection is part of life. Failure is just one step closure to success. Unless you have failed, you have not tried well enough. We have heard all these statements and more. But when we fail, or we get rejected, none of these statements and learning are of any help. However, one has to learn to accept Rejection and Failure in one’s stride and use it positively to steer towards the growth mindset.
In 1989, I moved to Chennai to set up Ulka Advertising’s office in that city. Strange as it may sound, the agency by then already had offices in Kochi, Bangalore and Hyderabad (two had never made profits in their history), but not yet in Chennai till I was sent there to open one. While it was nice to be based out of Chennai, I travelled more than four days a week. Also, at that point, I hadn’t yet pitched for any business in Chennai itself.
Cut to the bar at Connemara Hotel. I met Chinnen at the promised time of 7.30 p.m. and soon we were joined by Mr Pradipta Mohapatra, the President of Spencer’s. Chinnen left soon after and I was left to work my charm on Pradipta. I did not have to try. We spoke of many things including life in Kolkata (and my two years at Joka, where the IIM was located), the RPG Group’s plans in Chennai, Ulka’s old history with CeatTyres, another RPG Group company and so on. As the evening progressed I discovered that I was thoroughly enjoying Pradipta’s company. There was so much to learn from him and his views on life. We did not speak a word about advertising or marketing. I did not ask for business, and that worked in my favour. As we ended the evening, Pradipta asked me if I would like to work on his new business plans. I confessed that I was a one-man show in Chennai and I did not want to take on his work and disappoint him. To which Pradipta replied that he was also working with a small team and where would he get a guy like me to work hands-on. As if that weren’t enough, he then went on to say that he liked me, I seemed to be a good guy and that Ulka was a known agency, which had done work for the Group. And then he cut to the chase, asking me to meet him the next day. We shook hands at 9 p.m. and that’s how I landed my first account in Chennai—without any RFP, pitch or extended negotiations on team size and revenues!
The author was very apprehensive at the beginning to launch his book at Godrej India Culture Lab because he thought there would not be enough people to fill the huge auditorium. But he was in for a surprise when not only was the auditorium full; people had to occupy the aisles to sit through the book launch. We are talking about MG Parameswaran or Ambi as he is popularly known, who launched his book ‘Nawab, Nudes and Noodles’ on June 9.
It was September 1994. Our agency DraftFCBUlka (then Ulka Advertising) had just completed a new advertising film for the soap brand Santoor. The new creative was set in an aerobics studio and featured the Santoor woman exercising to some lively music. The ad, which was being shot by the veteran ad film director PrahladKakkar, was going to be a breakthrough. All of us in the agency believed that it would work in the marketplace to resurrect the brand that had hit a plateau after seeing great growth for a few years. We had in fact bet the agency’s reputation on this ad with our long-term client Wipro. But I was very worried. I suddenly remembered that right through the film the Santoor woman was not shown sporting a bindi. In the story, she was a mother and her kid enters the scene with a loud ‘mummy’ squeal much to the surprise of onlookers. How could we have missed out on the bindi, I wondered. First thing next morning I called our film manager Monia Pinto and asked her if we could ‘rotoscope’ a bindi on the model PriyaKakkar’s forehead (rotoscopy is a technique whereby you insert a digital image into a real-life moving picture; it was relatively new and very expensive in the mid 1990s; the Hollywood film Who Framed Roger Rabbit had used this to great effect). Monia, the liberal that she is, pooh-poohed my worry. As did many of my other colleagues. The film was presented to the client, aired on television and became a landmark film in the history of brand Santoor. The Santoor woman, sans bindi, went on to play cricket, teach hula hoop to her kid and even made film stars dance to her tune over the next decade, helping make Santoor the third largest soap brand in the country. But the bindi thought stayed with me. The bindi is a part of Hindu culture and even has a strong tantric underpinning. Both men and women wear the bindi or bindu, which means drop or globule. It is supposed to be the sacred symbol of the universe, depicted as a dot or the zero. Applied between the eyebrows, it is purported to be the position of the sixth chakra, a place which is also the exit point of kundalini energy. Tantric literature abounds with explanations on the red bindu (symbolizing fire/blood) and white bindu (symbolizing semen). Married women also wear red vermilion or sindoor in the parting of their hair, which is first applied there by their husband on their wedding day, during the sindoordana ceremony. Only married women are allowed to wear the sindoor, according to Hindu custom. Interestingly, though Islam does not have a bindi or sindoor custom, most Muslim women in Bangladesh sport a bindi. Even in Pakistan, Muslim women at times wear designer bindis, quite ignoring the Hindu symbolism of the bindi.