Which was your first advertising agency and how did your career evolve over time?
My first ad agency was ASP which was run by the Birlas. It used to be one of the largest ad agencies in the country in those days. The first year was very challenging as well as full of learning. Here I grew through the ranks to become an illustrator, visualizer, finisher and in less than two years I became art director as well. After enjoying this for some time I requested to my General Manager to let me move into client servicing. They did not allow me this so I had to quit and moved on to a much smaller agency in Kerala where I took up a client servicing profile. Here I learnt what it feels like to face a client, how to understand their problems and finally how to work out a solution for it. I also learnt business development and got new clients for the company. After some time, I started my own agency with the help of a few friends. Here we made decent money as this was the time of financial boom and businesses were spending good money to reach out to their target audiences. Later I sold my agency and came to Bombay. Since that time, I have worked for many agencies.
What has been your philosophy towards your profession and how do you approach your work?
Being a science student, I have always tried to explore why things happen the way they do more than thinking about how to make a particular thing happen. In the initial days of my career, I did not keep myself limited to the creative part of ad making. I used to mingle with people from divisions like planning, client servicing, etc, to get to know more about their work. This helped me a lot in the long term. I worked for every agency as if it was mine. A sense of ownership drives the creative spirit in your work.
What kind of relationship do you share with people from other ad agencies?
More than thinking about them as competitors, I consider them my partners. For sure we compete for business but once I have acquired business from a particular client I often receive calls from my friends in the industry who give feedback or suggestions for our work. I reciprocate the same. This makes the industry, a good small world where people love, respect, co-exist and compete with each other. We may be competitors today but at some or the other point of time, most of us have worked with each other. Agnello (Dias), Shripad Nadkarni, R. Balki, Ravi Deshpande and Piyush (Pandey) are some of the great friends to name and I owe a lot of my good work to them.
What in your view are the essential requisites to be a successful creative director?
The most important need is to be surrounded by lots of enthusiastic and creative minds. When you find creative ideas flowing all around you, discussing and filtering the best of ideas becomes very easy. Another important thing is to ensure that the people are happy and cheerful. Creativity is at its best in those times when people are happy in their personal and professional lives. That is why you see that most ad-agencies go out of their way to keep the atmosphere light and cheerful. Also, to be successful, you need to keep yourself updated and keep learning new skills. When I came into the ad world, there was no color printing, color photography and computers etc. With the advent of these things, I kept myself updated with these. How can I communicate the value of a brand to a buyer if I myself cannot connect to it. Making the best attempt to keep pace with the changing times and competing with young, energetic people keeps you relevant.
