Life was a peach for advertising's wunderkind Alok Nanda. As the national creative director of Trikaya Grey, he'd led the agency to the heights of creativity and a whole lot of the awards that adorn the front office at the agency headquarters in Lower Parel, Mumbai. Then he quit. He canned his job to do his own thing in a decrepit building overlooking Mumbai's dockyard. But, no, his brainchild Alok Nanda Communications, started in September 1999, is no ad agency. "We're a creative consultancy," pointed out the unassuming director. The job description at ANC, in one word, is communication. That could include designing a website, creating a corporate image, or planning the display areas in a store. And he is happy. "We have done far better and grown far faster than I had imagined," he told Alokananda Chakraborty of agencyfaqs!. In this freewheeling interview, he said that while ANC may not be equipped to handle the whole gamut of communication needs for brands/corporates, it is set to play a big role in areas beyond the traditional domain of mainline advertising agencies.

Q. Having spent a good 15 years at Trikaya, what prompted you to suddenly quit the agency and start ANC? Were you always very entrepreneurial?

A. I left Trikaya because, as I saw it, after Ravi Gupta there was no real reason for me to stay on. That is one reason. The other is, for a long while, I have been planning to do something on my own. I think in life things happen when they have to happen.

And, no, I don’t think I am entrepreneurial even now. What I am doing here is the kind of work I’ve always wanted to do… It has nothing to do with being with Trikaya or anywhere else. I enjoyed working at Trikaya and I think it’s a great agency. But an advertising agency, in many ways, doesn’t let you do a whole lot of things you would want to do. I am known as a writer but my interest lies far beyond – in graphic art, in design, in retail design, book design and stuff like that. These are not part of the traditional advertising agency purview. But that’s what I want to do We are one year and about six months old now … you can see I have lost track … but so far things have been not just fine but have gone extremely well. In fact, I am very happy with what we are doing so far. So I guess I am on the right track.

Q. How long has ANC been on your mind and how long did it take to make it happen? And after your experience in starting up, what is more important - creativity or entrepreneurship?

A. I did know exactly what I wanted to do. However, it is easy to say that but difficult to make it happen. The first month or so was very stressful. I was juggling so many things, including finding carpenters to get the desks made - look I've never handled administration. Overall, I think it took us a little over a year-and-a-half to get this off the ground.

Coming to your second question, I think it's neither. I think what is far more important is to know what you want to do. Knowing this has nothing to do with creativity or entrepreneurship.

Q. You said you chose not to stay on as a professional because you felt constricted within the 'traditional agency framework'. What were the options when you decided to quit Trikaya Grey?

A. I chose to do what I wanted to do. And a lot of it has nothing to do with advertising - that is what we do here. If not start ANC, I could have gone abroad I believe. If I had to work for another ad agency, I would have worked abroad. In fact, the only agency I did work for - and I am extremely grateful for that - when I left Trikaya Grey was with Ulka. Anil Kapoor called and made me an offer. He is an extremely upfront and generous man. He said, "I know you are setting up a company, I know you don't have time, but please come and consult for Ulka," which I did for some time… And if it hadn't been for a lack of time, I would have continued with my commitment.

Q. Did this apprehension - of getting constricted - have anything to do with Grey increasing its stake in the company? Were you by any way put off by the prospect of having to work for MNC clients that supposedly have very inflexible attitude towards creative? Take Procter & Gamble. The perception is that they lay down very strict dos and don'ts… Did you have any such fear?

A. No. I had job offers in Manhattan and a couple of other places in Europe. They were all multinationals. If that were the case, I wouldn't be considering these. In any case, are MNCs inflexible? I don't know; that sounds interesting. It's worth studying… if they behaved differently with Indian partners…

However, the fact is, while I was at Grey I was not particularly involved with P&G in any way. And to cut back to your question, I work for people; I don't work for agencies - I've done that throughout my career.

Q. Talking about people… you had the good fortune of working both with Ravi Gupta and (the former creative director) Christopher Rozario. What have you learnt form them that has supported you through your career?

A. For the first three years, my interaction was more with Christopher than with Ravi Gupta. I was a copywriter and I learnt two things from him. One was, of course, the craft of copy writing, which I believe is something you really learn on the job. Besides copy, and more importantly, I think I learnt how you interact with people, how you deal with them.

What I learnt from Mr Gupta is what I am attempting to do here. It is a very peculiar thing that in today's world we have all these agencies that talk about 360-degree branding, communication and not advertising… things like that. But that's something we always did at Trikaya in the early days. My vivid memories are of getting a four-and-a-half hour brief from Ravi Gupta on generating a brand name. I remember Preeti (Vyas Giannetti) and I going bananas, spending a month-plus developing packaging copy, packaging label and packaging of a product. That is something for which, say in the US or the UK, you would typically go to a packaging consultant. That's why for multinational agencies it's a major new thing - this-360 degree global branding. They say 'we don't just do advertising, we do packaging label also'. But in India, there's never been any packaging consultancy, any retail design company or label design company. The agencies have always done these things themselves.

Great communications strategies don't come from the expected areas, great opportunities don't necessarily come from what is obvious. They come from propositions like, say, can you turn around recruitment advertising in a way that it stands out in the clutter. I would be completely tempted to take up tender notice advertising and see what we can do with it. I mean that's the challenge. Sure, I would love to handle a commercial for a pair of jeans. But can you take an industrial product and make it as glamorous as an FMCG product? Actually, we have created these artificial boundaries - consumer products, non-consumer products and things like that.

Q. Is that what you call under-the-radar advertising? Is that what you are trying to implement at ANC?

A. Yes, that's a phrase coined by Kirshenbaum Bond & Partners. It's another great agency in the US. They talk about how people are averse to advertising. They see an ad, they instinctively shut themselves off. So you need to do things that are non-advertisement-like. That's pretty much what we are looking at. But the difference is that what they are talking of is essentially advertising. We are looking at a hell lot more…

Q. But what role could ANC possibly play in the life of a brand, or, for that matter, where does ANC stand vis-a-is big agency networks?

A. Ultimately, all communication reflects on the bottom line of the client. The question is how well it does this. Every client and every brand has different needs. It is likely that one brand may have multiple communication needs. Taking a brand and doing a 30-second spot may not necessarily be the right answer. Every communications partner - from large global network to somebody smaller than ANC - has a certain role to play, to fulfil a certain premise. It would be foolish to say that I can now handle a global brand like General Motors across Asia Pacific. I can't. That's not what I am geared up for. But it is equally possible that I can contribute to one of their brands in a certain manner that a large global network cannot. So, I think you are looking at the prospects from our perspective; if you see it from the client's perspective, I think at times he needs to have an arrangement with a range of solution partners, and then he can pick and choose, as and when, depending on what he needs.

Q. So, what sort of clients is ANC best suited for - the start-up kinds?

A. Let's look at the reality. Would you call the Taj Group of hotels a start-up brand? We've been working with Taj. Would you call Gujarat Ambuja cement a start-up client, a small brand? We've created a financial communication, internal corporate communication, dealer relationship communication, and even composed and executed a corporate anthem for them. We are doing work in unusual areas. We are doing work, for example, in areas like signage systems. These are not the traditional advertising agency areas and they call for a very different approach. Take Bombay Store, the browsers' café at Crossword, or for that matter another of our clients, Barista, the coffee bar chain. We have been trying to create a look-feel for Barista at the retail level. Here, no amount of advertising will help. Here the brand has to be expressed at various points - like the menu board, the signage systems. All these things say a lot about the product. Barista is now rolling out in other cities and we are working with them on the entire look-feel and we hope it's going in the right direction.

Q. You had also started Cognito with the aim of creating a brand name consultancy. Considering that corporates in India don't even approach specialist designers for product design or packaging design, do you think a market for a specialist outfit like Cognito exists?

A. It would be wrong if you stated that I started Cognito. It is a joint venture between Alok Nanda & Company and ORMAX, a well-known market research company headed by Vispy Doctor. Talking about a market, it definitely exists. Which agency puts in quality time in brand names? Nobody really cares because you don't get a 15 per cent commission on brand names.

There are two areas in which we could contribute. One, consumer product naming, an area in which companies overseas have specialised. Two, working on dotcom names. Cognito would be about eight months old now and it has done a fair amount of work in dotcom projects. We've done work for some retailing clients, like Globus, which is a South-based retail chain brand like Shopper's Stop.

Q. This question has nothing to do with ANC, but do you think with television taking up so much money from print, the art of copy writing is dying?

A. What has broadly happened is that the art of copy writing has shifted to different fields. In the old days, the job demarcation was fairly clear. TV was broadly playing the role of imparting awareness and print was used to convince the consumer, give him a rational proposition, a reason why. For whatever reason - because of reach, because more people are watching television - print has abdicated the role of giving people the reason to buy to what we disdainfully call below-the-line advertising.

Thus, a lot of the advertising today has brilliant imagery, which makes you remember the brand, but it doesn't give enough reason for you to want to buy it. So, increasingly, especially abroad, people are moving more and more into direct marketing and direct print ads, as well as going to the net. Now, people use copy in these print ads to complete the sale. Also the art of copy writing is declining. It may partly have to do with skill sets.

Q. Since its inception ANC has had mixed fortunes. The high note was striking the sharekhan campaign. Subsequently not much has come from the agency in terms of award-winning work. Would you like to comment?

A. Awards? Let me tell you what we have achieved. We entered the Ad Club this year and won in every category we were eligible to. Because most of our work last year was for dotcom clients and the Ad Club had clubbed all dotcom advertising as one. The categories were: campaigns for docoms, single ad dotcoms and retail. Fifty per cent of what is not in advertising. So we are not eligible for a lot of these categories. We didn't enter the AAAI awards because we are not an "advertising agency". And the A&M verdict is yet to come out. And, mind you, we are just about a year-and-a-half old.

Q. Where do you see yourself in two years?

A. I would like to see ANC doing more and more of unconventional and outrageous communication. Whether it's advertising or not is unimportant. It could be the launch of a jeans brand or a corporate brand - it could be anything. Doing it from scratch is the real challenge. Look at the kind of stuff we've done for CHannel [V]. Our task was to raise the profile among decision makers. On the one hand, we were talking to the marketing heads of companies about what V was, and, on the other hand, we were doing a campaign with the VJs on the launch of vindia.com. We are looking to work for more such project-based clients. But we want to keep our core clients like sharekhan, Bombay Stores and Crossword.

June 18, 2001
Mumbai
You can write to Alok Nanda at
aloknandacompany@hotmail.com