“I am a good storyteller, therefore I am good at what I do – advertising. Great advertising is great storytelling, nothing less, nothing more,” said ad guru Prahlad Kakkar. He was delivering the 42nd Ayaz Peerbhoy lecture on January 31, 2023 in Bengaluru.
Kakkar spoke about his journey from majoring in military history to being a Citibank employee to building a career in advertising.
The course in military history helped him in his advertising career, he revealed.
“As part of the course, we visited all army cantonments and I loved it. Today, when I go to B-schools and am asked why I am delivering lectures on marketing and branding without an MBA, the answer is that I have studied the mother of all MBAs. Because in a war there are no mistakes or retakes. Military history is all about people who made mistakes and never saw the light of the day after that. What military history actually gave me was more stories, much more exciting ones,” he said.
Kakkar added that it was the library of all his imagination. Even today, he goes back to it for references all the time, because it is ‘the mother of all markets’.
The ad filmmaker said that as humans, we have two choices to make in life, one being to rationalise every decision and the other to be more intuitive.
“When you have a decision to make, follow your instinct. The more you rationalise, you will be wrong. People always rationalise because you want to be in a particular way, that’s not how the world functions,” he added.
According to Kakkar, advertising is one career where if one is intuitive, one will never fail.
“If you rationalise advertising you are dead because it is predictable and mediocre and 2+2 will already be four. If you want 2+2=22, you have to dream. It doesn’t exist, it is not rational. But you create that value and present it because it is intuitive,” Kakkar said.
“Our business is all about dreams. Dreaming about the future and good of everybody and that in my opinion is what advertising is all about. The storytelling of the dreams,” noted the speaker.
“Today, a lot of people say that I am an advertising legend. It’s all rubbish because everything is time bound. If you look at my work 15 to 20 years ago and the work of today’s generation, there is a huge difference. The stories and storytelling in my work is fine, but the work is not contemporary and not cutting-edge,” he added.
It’s not all dreams and intuition – Kakkar connected the dots between trivia and advertising.
“When we look at the word trivia, we turn out and say it’s trivial. The greatest ability of greatest advertising minds is assimilation and memories of trivia; that’s what sends you in a different tangent, it takes you out of the box,” he surmised.
