India: Overview

A wildly paradoxical mix of ancient and modern, poverty and prosperity, chaos and creativity sends David Knight spinning into the ‘riddle wrapped up in an enigma’ that is today’s India.

Welcome to India – the world’s newest economic powerhouse, and, in the arena of advertising and commercial production, a land that boasts the most exciting potential anywhere in the world. While Western economies struggle through recession, India is essentially the land the global downturn forgot. While the 2008 crash hammered the economies (and advertising spends) of Western countries, and damaged China’s huge export-led growth, India was barely scratched. And after a brief pause, India’s rapid progress has resumed.

These are exciting times due to the unique conditions of a nation that reconciles two opposing forces: old India, with its persistent poverty, mass illiteracy, inefficient bureaucracy, power cuts and decrepit infrastructure; and the new India, in which a pervasive culture of go-getting entrepreneurialism is growing a mind-bogglingly large Indian middle class and a new generation of consumers.

India’s advertising industry is reaping the benefit, dealing with new challenges and becoming more international, in terms of clients, ad agencies, and production. Multinational corporate advertising now dominates ad spends in India, as it does elsewhere on the globe. An old guard of Western ad agencies has been in the country for years, but a new influx of agencies with global networks is joining them, including W+K and BBH. London agency Beattie McGuinness Bungay has just launched a joint venture with Madison World – one of India’s largest communication groups – that will see BMB open offices in both Mumbai and Delhi.

“The biggest driver of growth is internal consumption,” notes Bobby Pawar, chief creative officer of DDB Mudra Group in Mumbai, whose clients include Volkswagen, Philips and Johnston & Johnston. “Consumer confidence has built up again, the middle class is growing, and so is media.” In fact the Indian TV industry has exploded: the country now has over 400 TV channels. And that is arguably not even the most exciting element of its media landscape.

Although internet usage is moderate, due to the lack of broadband coverage, India has moved directly to mobile. There are an estimated 635 million mobile phone users in India – and 3G is coming soon. “50 per cent of India’s population is under the age of 27,” explains Shyam Madiraju, owner and director of Indian-American production company Gobsmack TV. “We’re talking about a 300-500 million educated, upwardly mobile and motivated buying force. And these kids use their smart phones more often than any other single device.”

You can add a further element to this exciting scenario: the IPL. Since 2008, the world’s biggest 20:20 cricket tournament – which attracts all the world’s best players – has transfixed cricket-mad India. “It’s a big addition to the advertising calendar,” says Ramki Sankaranarayanan, president/CEO of Prime Focus Technologies (the technology arm of post production giant Prime Focus). “It’s a 45-day event – and every day is like the SuperBowl.” Not surprisingly, commercial production is booming. “Ten years ago there were 75-80 production companies, now there are 3,000,” estimates Robin D’Cruz, executive producer at Gobsmack TV’s Bangalore office. “Five years ago, scripts wouldn’t be as demanding in terms of effects, nor as creative. Now the main creative work is coming out of big multinationals – but smaller brands in India will do good work, too.”

“There’s been a dramatic increase in the number of production companies vying for the growth of the market,” confirms Sankaranarayanan. “Telecoms advertising didn’t exist 15 years ago – that’s all changed. Demands for more compelling imagery has scaled significantly over time. We have two post production studios in Mumbai dedicated just to advertising.” It is not surprising that the commercials that made the greatest impact last year were for a multinational mobile phone company with ads that were made specifically to run in the breaks during IPL matches.

Vodafone’s ZooZoo campaign, conceived by Ogilvy & Mather India’s creative director, Rajiv Rao, and directed by Prakash Varma at Nirvana Films, was a phenomenon. The delightful ads features the ZooZoos, creatures with white balloon bodies and egg heads that look animated but are actually shot live action. They immediately struck a chord with the young TV audience, and gained a huge following on Facebook, Twitter and Indian social network site Orkut. “That was very fresh advertising,” declares Sankaranarayanan of the campaign, which is notably unspecific in its national or cultural origins. “Afterwards, every other telco brand tried to have that – and their agencies drew a lot of flak as a result.”

Prakash Varma is one of numerous Indian directors working full time on what is often very different work to the ZooZoo campaign, such as his awardwinning Neo Sports and Incredible India spots. “He has a lot of style and is a very good storyteller,” says Bobby Pawar, who also cites Prasoon Pandey, Amit Sharma and Ram Madhvani – director of the brilliant Cannes silver Lion-winning ad for Happydent White in 2006 – as being equally adept. And there is a lot of work out there – often demanding fast turnarounds.

Pawar’s agency produces 120 ads a year. “The bulk are done with local production houses – like Nirvana, Chrome, Equinox, Corcoise,” he says. And in the past year he has also made ads with @radical.media in Berlin, and Stink in London. “Every year you see an improvement in the kind of commercials being created. Scripts are better, production is better – there are more international directors working in the Indian commercial scene.” This internationalisation has taken off in the last few years, with agencies looking beyond the country’s borders for production and post production solutions – particularly for international brands.

Gobsmack TV made a big impression with their KitKat ad The Break – featuring a Bollywood song-anddance routine by CGI squirrels, made in the US with LA post house Radium. But just as important is the influx of talent from outside India. “We have a lot of projects where we bring in a director or a cameraman from abroad,” confirms V Sunil, executive creative director at W+K Delhi, whose recent work includes a successful ad for low-fare airline IndiGo, directed by British director Harvey Brown and promoting the idea of punctual air travel as ‘IndiGo Time’. “The film had a massive impact. It wasn’t planned, but ‘IndiGo Time’ has become a common saying.”

The company behind the IndiGo spot, Bang Bang Films, started in 2006 and has become one of India’s leading production companies. “2010 has been absolutely amazing to the point that we’ve been rated the second fastestgrowing company across all sectors,” announces Bang Bang Films’ MD and executive producer, Roopak Saluja. “The industry was ripe for change in 2006. We pushed internationalisation in the market and almost everything we did was look-based. Clients like Unilever don’t stop spending even with the downturn. We brought in international talent for middle market stuff too. Four years later there’s much greater openness to working with international directors.”

Saluja adds that an increasing chunk of their business is working for advertisers outside India, and that India is becoming a more attractive hub within southern Asia and the Middle East. “A localised advertising culture is becoming internationalised to an extent – more a part of the whole of Asia and the Pacific,” he says. “25 per cent of our business comes from outside India – and it will be 70 per cent by 2012.” Is this influx of foreign talent having a negative impact on the next generation of Indian commercial directors? Unsurprisingly, Saluja only sees good things. “Advertising and commercials are a combination of art and commerce, which can only flourish with external influences,” he says.

In fact, there appears to be widespread acceptance that competition between local and foreign talent improves standards – and there certainly seems to be enough work to go round. “I don’t agree that Indian directors are any less talented – but neither are they suffering,” says Manoj Shroff, executive producer at Equinox Films, which represents an all-Indian line-up of directors, including Ram Madhvani.

Ramki Sankaranarayanan points out that in the current economic climate, a European director may be the most cost-effective option. “Indian talent has been incredibly busy – it’s maxed out on one level.” He also argues that the crowded media environment has forced creatives and producers to up the ante. “One way of dealing with clutter is getting more creative – and agencies are getting fired if their competitors are making successful campaigns that people are talking about.”

But the highly reactive nature of Indian advertising can also mitigate against producing absolutely top-notch work. “There’s a lot of work coming in with short turnaround times,” notes Robin D’Cruz. “The ethics are different from the West – here you work anytime, and clients expect you to work like that.” “Advertisers are backing expectations with budgets that have increased significantly in the last five years,” adds Sankaranarayanan. “The irony is that people don’t have a lot of time to create what Western brands spend a lot of time on. It’s part of the growth frenzy that India has been through, this instant response to market activity. It’s going to continue for a while.”

D’Cruz points out that, like everywhere else, Indian agency creatives can be overly influenced by what they see online. “There’s a lot of checking on other people’s work, then changing it a bit,” he ventures. V Sunil at W+K Delhi goes further: “There’s certainly a new generation of art directors, but I would struggle to find a new generation of writers,” he says. But Karan Singh, who runs Prime Focus London’s digital pipeline with Mumbai, says India’s TV audience is also changing. “They’re more accepting of high-end production values,” he claims. “Ten years ago it was more script and humourbased. Now things are more graphic – but the wit and humour is still there.”

Meanwhile, the drive to create content for digital platforms is also building momentum – and with the launch of 3G on the sub-continent in a few months time, the impact and rewards associated with mobile advertising could be momentous. “We’re getting into digital and mobile apps,” says Bang Bang’s Saluja, whose digital offshoot, Jack in the Box, creates content directly for brands. “You could say that some agencies perceive us as a threat, others as a complement to what they do. It’s happening the world over – there’s going to be in-house production at agencies too.”

“It would be a blunder not to grasp digital advertising with both hands and feet,” agrees Madiraju at Gobsmack. “Infrastructure issues like outdated phone cables and intermittent electric supply are bigger challenges for advertisers than the barriers of the mind.” Others are less convinced, saying it will take a lot to break the hypnotic stranglehold that TV holds over the mass populace. “I don’t think digital has caught on yet,” says Manoj Shroff. “Television is the big player, there’s no question.” But Indian advertising is clearly looking to the future, coming up with ideas that are getting international attention.

For example, in September, DDB India created the first talking newspaper advert to launch the new Volkswagen Vento. Made possible by a specially created light-sensitive chip installed in copies of The Times of India and The Hindu newspapers – 2.5 million were manufactured – the Vento ad really did ‘talk’ when the paper was opened. “It’s a brilliantly made car, and the concept was about giving voice to the engineers who built it as well as to a medium that has no voice,” says Bobby Pawar, who spent six months planning the ad. “It’s never been done before, certainly on this scale.”

There is no doubt that India is being transformed. Is it becoming increasingly Westernised? “India is a culture in transition,” says Pawar. “People have so much exposure to things outside India. We have a stand-up comedy scene – it’s an idea imported from the West, but it’s very local in nature. Essentially, we’re taking these things from all over the place and making them our own.” Advertising is also actively engaging with the new India. W+K Delhi have launched a magazine called Motherland, and opened an art gallery for the cool kids, first-adopters and opinion-formers not catered to by mainstream magazines or Indian TV. “The art gallery is five shows old,” says V Sunil. “They’ve been successful, we have the art community’s support, and my financial director is not shouting at me anymore.”

India’s economy will continue to grow at astonishing rates over the next few years, and may find itself in a virtuous circle of prosperity. But Manoj Shroff points out that, for all the positivity and optimism, there is still a long way to go. “A Bollywood director friend of mine was in the US on a film shoot, there was a power cut and people were freaking out. Well, that’s a way of life in India. We’re still used to living in trying circumstances.”