The Idea Artist

I’m writing this blog on a beautiful monday morning and I’m not feeling the blues, and a quick review of all the hate for mondays makes me realize that I’m really lucky. I credit this little victory to the fact that I work from home. That being said, let me give you a little tour of how working from home started out for me, especially in context of the fact that I live in good old Pakistan.

Before I begin, I have a confession to make: I’m not a workaholic. I’m generally a very lazy person. Bill Gates quips about how he always employs lazy people because they find easy ways to do difficult work. I’ve totally made that my mantra and/or excuse for being the way I am.

As some regular readers might know, I quit my job a few months ago and partnered to start a small advertising agency called Ishtehari. But I was bitten with the ‘work from home’ bug while I was still working for my previous employers. It all came about from the fact that employees in Pakistan have little or no rights as far as working regulations are concerned. A tough market for labour means that your boss can make you work twice as many working hours and make it sound like he’s doing it as a favour to you. There’s no overtime compensation so they throw you a bone in the way of “flexibility”.

This mentality had evolved, inspired by Unilever’s ambitious “Agile” working model, towards a result oriented work environment. The agency I worked for believed  responsibilities rather than timeclocks because they knew they wouldn’t be able to squeeze as much out of people if they followed the working hours schedule. You are supposed to do X task. Where and when you want you do it is your headache.

This sort of work environment quickly became addictive. It offered the flexibility I needed to get things done at my own pace, and I didn’t have to do it in a depressing cubicle. It started to grow on me. I liked it that the word “work” was some measure of productivity and didn’t necessarily connote a place that I had to go to.

I was hooked.

Here’s a picture of what Unilever’s soap brand Lux is doing in the outdoor media space for its silk protein campaign in Pakistan.

It might not rank very high in terms of creativity, but it’s a welcome sight of innovation in the outdoor advertising spaces of Pakistan. Kudos to the team who got this past the gatekeepers.. I know how difficult it is for a market leader to move beyond the tried and tested. That being said, the investment could have been utilized in better executions.

Saw a similar silky curtains execution on a bus stop, which makes much more sense. Too bad that in Pakistan, the channel is a relative mismatch with their target audience.

The sort of agency environment I’ve been working in demands that a strategist be briefed directly by the brand team alongside account directors, and in turn it is our responsibility to organize, identify, and relay the brand’s requirements to the creative team. That being said, you’ll just have to take my word that I’ve met with a fairly large number of band managers in fairly short period of time. Not all of them have the same attitude.

The clients that I enjoy working with are those that truly believe in their product. You can gauge it from their tone and the excitement in their eyes. They have faith in the product. They know they’ve got a winner on their hands.. all it needs is the right kind of publicity.

Then there are those that look to us, the marketers, to do our magic. These are the people that you have the probe to actually find out about their product’s USP. And often enough, the probing results in a face-saving collection of jargon that doesn’t do much. Short of naming names, I’m going to say that I’ve seen many such situations in banks and FMCGs.

Such brand teams treat marketers like magicians. They argue that the right combination of “creativity” and media budget will result in their brand becoming a runaway hit. Very rightly so, they quote a number of examples from the local marketing scene that has worked on this formula: me-too products that are riding on their ad campaigns.

They believe in the marketing myth.

Yes, there are instances of you succeeding in your brand goals by the second route also. But the odds are in your favour if your product is truly valuable to the consumer. It should fill a need, or at the very least be sufficiently differentiated from your competitors. While most ad agencies will tell you otherwise, the biggest budgets and the brightest ideas of the ad world can only sustain your meh product in the short run.

What’s worse; great marketing can only kill a shoddy product faster.