MUMBAI -
AdAsia 2003, ballyhooed as Asia's biggest annual
advertising meet, is gearing up for its November 10
start in India's desert city of Jaipur. The five-day
fiesta, with 1,200 participants from 17 countries,
promises advertising, marketing and management ideas,
"Maharaja" dinners at the Rambagh Palace, golf, polo and
visits to Rajasthani village melas or bazaars.
AdAsia is thus partly a moveable feast for
Asia's advertising community. But it also symbolizes how
Asian advertising, particularly in India and Thailand,
is coming of age and weaning itself away from Western
concepts, images and ideas. Asian advertising work is
gaining notice across the world from the efforts of a
new breed of creative directors who use local culture
and down-to-earth story lines to spin out winning ideas.
"Advertising from Thailand attracted attention
before India did and continues to do so," Piyush Pandey,
group president and creative director of Ogilvey &
Mather's India operations, told Asia Times Online. "Work
that comes out of Thailand and India is very Thai and
very Indian, and yet it creates ripples around the
world."
Japan's Yukio Nakayama of Dentsu,
O&M's Pandey and Thailand's Jureeporn Thaidumrong of
Saatchi & Saatchi are among 24 speakers enlisted to
address the participants. Others include Scott Bedbury
of Nike's "Just Do it" campaign and Clyde Fessler of the
American Harley Davidson motorcycle company, who will
talk on cult branding. Aya-Cola's Sergio Zyman will
describe the end of advertising and marketing as we know
it.
"The success of every AdAsia depends on the
speakers it has and Jaipur has a stunning list," Pandey
said. "I have never seen anything like it before."
Pandey, with his trademark moustache giving him the look
of a benign bandit chief, is official town crier for the
event.
Backed by road shows in Bangalore,
Hyderabad, Delhi, Chennai and Mumbai, O&M is running
multimedia promo featuring colorfully turbaned Rajputs,
ruminative camels, royal and rural facades fused into
take-offs on famous ad slogans like the "whassup?"
Budweiser beer commercial. An AdAsia version of the
Abbot Mead Vickers ad for The Economist stares from a
wall in Pandey's cosy, informal office: replacing the
buttoned-down "management trainee, aged 42" in the
original is a wizened old Rajput, - a camel trader aged
72 - saying, "I never read The Economist."
Pandey created a half-open matchbox as the logo
for AdAsia 2003 as an incendiary image to "spark off
something", symbolizing the constant flux and change in
the advertising world. "Asian advertising has stopped
aping the West and is evolving a style of its own based
on different cultures in the region," says Pandey.
"There is more self-confidence, and therefore more fresh
ideas."
Thailand's advertising has been grabbing
worldwide headlines with the likes of Bhanu Inkawat's
"Amazing Thailand" tourism campaign in 1998, which
helped draw 8.65 million visitors to Thailand in 1999.
Or "Judy" Thaidumrong using a skull to promote Ray-Ban
sunglasses. Thaidumrong, as creative executive director
of Saatchi & Saatchi in Bangkok, has already pouched
over a dozen international awards this year. Along with
Japan's Morihiko Hasebe, she was one of two Asians in
the 23-member Cannes Lions jury this year.
In
India, non-English languages now dominate the
advertising media and buried long-gone times stretching
back to the 1970s when anything non-English in
advertising was considered infra dig. Pandey has been
churning out a string of much talked about campaigns –
as he did for Asian Paints, Fevicol and Center Shock
bubble gum - using simple imagery from every-day life.
One of his successful campaigns for Fevicol starred a
grimy cook in a dhabba – the rustic
atmosphere-filled roadside eateries that are popular in
Indian cities and on the highways that link them.
The theme for AdAsia 2003 - Breaking the rules –
is heaven for iconoclasts like Pandey. "When you follow
rules you are not evolving," says Pandey. "Be a sponge.
Absorb 10 different things, but what is squeezed out is
a unique mixture of what went in and not any one of them
individually." Pandey's bubble gum ad campaign, now
running in Italy, is a case in point, set as it is in a
derelict, dusty barber shop. The doddering, sad-looking
elderly barber pops a piece of bubble gum into the mouth
of a young client wanting a hairstyle out of a magazine.
The "electrifying" gum throws the client into violent
convulsions at the end of which his hair stands on end
in spikes. The barber and startled, open-mouthed client
solemnly compare the look from the magazine to ditto
image in mirror. They exchange an imperceptible nod of
approval.
Pandey, a former professional
cricketer and tea taster, was named Asia's Creative
Person of the Year 2002 by Media Asia. "The rest of the
world is watching the Asian ad industry closely,
particularly Thailand and India," Pandey says, "But it
would be naive to start believing that we have arrived."
Some good work came out of Indonesia last year, he says,
while Japan continues to turn out the occasional
exciting campaign, with an annual domestic advertising
market worth US$52.5 billion.
India squeezed out
the much-sought after chance to host AdAsia, 21 years
after hosting it in 1982 and earlier in 1970. "AdAsia is
a health check and learning for our community," says
Pandey, twiddling an unlit cigarette. Near him is a
poster of the entry on passive smoking that won O&M
two gold lions in Cannes 2003. In it, the Marlboro man
stands staring aghast at his horse lying dead from
second-hand tobacco smoke. Pandey cautiously chomped
flavored betel nuts when Asia Times Online met with him.
This distinct flavor for Asian advertising
through AdAsia has undergone a long gestation, beginning
cooking with a group of Japanese professionals in 1958.
Twenty-eight of them participated in the First Asian
Advertising Conference in Tokyo. The sequel after two
years was renamed The Asian Advertising Congress. AdAsia
has appeared every two years since then. Taipei was host
in 2001and Singapore is next in 2005.
Times are
good for Asia to make its mark in advertising for good,
Pandey says. McKinsey managing director worldwide Rajat
Gupta agrees. Gupta's speech for AdAsia 2003 on November
13 is on the rise of Asia as the new superpower.
Raja M is an independent writer based
in Mumbai, India.
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Sep 27, 2003
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