“Advertising is like God, nobody knows whether it works – but it works,” said Anantha Narayan, Founder of Blue Noodles, while speaking at Madras Ad Club’s #ADTALKS on the topic “Is Advertising Dead?” He delved deep into the past, present, and future of advertising.
“There is a term called DADvertising. Print ads used to be the biggest thing during my stint as a copywriter. The term ‘copywriter’ was invented for print ads, but with the launch of Doordarshan and the growth of satellite television paving the way for the launch of many other television channels, ad film writing became a common thing. Another major change happened in the country: people started migrating from rural areas to urban areas, resulting in Hindi becoming the main language of advertising. The Piyush Pandey revolution happened during the same period, where even ads for urban products were done in Hindi. Anything that an ad agency did became famous and popular – thanks to media exposure, everyone knew the words of the jingles released,” Narayan said.
The evolution of the internet and social media shook up the advertising model.
“Earlier, agencies used to charge based on space or time duration and used to get a 15% commission; everyone was well-paid. Then media buying firms came into the picture, and agency commission got cut to 7.5%. As a result, a downward spiral happened. Beginners started getting paid less, as did Creative Directors and Art Directors. Studios were given up, all due to cost-cutting, which killed advertising at some level. Advertising was the field where A.R. Rahman entered the world of creativity through ad jingles, and actor Vikram began his career as a Copywriter at Lintas Chennai. This is a field where Salman Rushdie entered as a Copywriter, and actor John Abraham entered as a media planner. We were attracting wonderful talents from across the country. What happened due to cost-cutting was that many people felt that they were not getting what they deserved,” he said.
According to Narayan, as a result, some copywriters left to become writers, and another set joined music channels like MTV, Channel V, etc. He further explained, “A few of them went into the film field as scriptwriters. Art directors started getting offers from web design companies, graphic design companies. Mid-level Client servicing or branch heads started to feel that because of their efforts, the group was making a lot of money, and they started something of their own; that’s when larger agencies started to split and become smaller agencies. All this happened due to the 15% commission dropping to 7.5%. Then from there, it dropped to 4%, and then clients started saying instead of paying commission, we will start paying a monthly retainer fee, and that’s how monthly retainer fee started. As a result, cities like Chennai started to be affected when clients started feeling that the city didn’t have enough talent, so they started moving accounts to other cities.”
Narayan further spoke about the evolution of social media, performance and influencer marketing, and the emergence of FADvertising.
“A big bang of advertising happened, and FADvertising emerged. The ad guys used to think that we were the center of the universe; then platforms like Facebook, YouTube, WhatsApp, etc., became the center. Almost all these platforms have the presence of half the population of India. Then slowly ad agencies started calling themselves agencies,” the speaker said.
He then spoke about the term called RADvertising.
“We witnessed the emergence and growth of content creators, which has affected the ad business. We have been cornered from everywhere by different people. What is the survival policy available for us? The solution is MADvertising, where M stands for Marketing. Advertising, clubbed with Marketing, is the way out. Everybody is doing advertising today. There is no budget today, as Marketing has become cool; there are marketing budgets. The way out is to integrate marketing with advertising. Marketing means putting the consumer at the center, and we should know them like the back of our hand,” Narayan added.
Narayan spoke about brand creation in MADvertising. He said, “Brand creation is about creating our own Universe. Look at the example of Director Lokesh Kanakaraj – he has created a ‘Lokiverse’ with his film characters. We have the ability to create brand universes – the ad people can do it. We need to reposition ourselves as brand creators, and that needs to be communicated. We need to learn the money-making as well.”
