Great work is all about unexpected relevance. That won’t change in a million years.

Narayan Kumar, executive creative director of TBWA India, has more than two decades of advertising experience behind him. The better part of his industry experience was with Mudra CommunicationsDDB, followed by stints in JWT and Lowe.

Kumar has worked on campaigns such as Debeers, which won an Effie; launched the Orange network in Mumbai through aggressive outdoor; he also launched the ICICI Prudential brand that used the Indian woman’s ‘bindi’ (the dot on the forehead) motif as an emotional symbol of protection. Some of his ongoing campaigns include Reliance, Godrej home appliances and Bajaj two-wheelers.

Kumar who simply loves advertising, plays with a school-boy rock band called Kastadyne in his spare time. Sumita Vaid Dixit of agencyfaqs! caught up with Kumar to find out how exactly does he plan to make TBWAIndia, a creative force in the country. Excerpts.

Edited Excerpts

Bold campaigns for big clients. After all, clever and small stuff that are only seen by juries do not get us anywhere. Yet, you can't take much of a creative stance unless you have enough national and big clients. Last year, our focus was precisely on this issue. Among the significant gains were Standard Chartered, Allianz Bajaj, Zandu Balm, Schwarzkopf, Pedigree and Twinings. These are big names and hopefully, a few more are on the way. They were significant wins because most of them were won against stiff competition from noteworthy agencies.

Who doesn’t wish to scale greater heights? It’s part of the reason why I joined TBWA too. Often wanting something badly enough is the first step towards getting it. Let’s just say, TBWA has a bunch of talented people who have won for themselves a nice set of accounts. Now, they are smarting at the lack of recognition they deserve and are prepared to do something about it.

All the tools are there – Disruption and Connections; fabulous international network support; and, most of all, a great set of clients including, Standard Chartered, BPL Mobile, adidas, Pedigree, Samsonite, Schwarzkopf, Zandu and Allianz Bajaj, to mention a few. As always, the only thing we need badly but don’t have is – time. Time, that’s what we need. Give this young-blood agency a bit of time and you will see some remarkable things happening within a year-and-a-half or two.

Traditionally, TBWA and earlier, as Anthem, has been an excellent ‘print’ agency. Some of the biggest international and Indian awards had come TBWA’s way through the print and poster categories. It was also the way the clients were. Sure, that’s a great reputation you can’t give up. But we need to build from there. The big deal impression you make finally – whether at home or abroad – is on television. That’s going to be a worthwhile challenge. And suddenly, the right kind of clients for doing great TV have also just walked in. All in all, this is going to be great. There’s nothing like consistent, great work on television to make a solid reputation for an agency.

As it stands, TBWA has some serious, senior talent on board. Probir Dutt has led the Delhi office creatives for about five years now. That office have a way of picking up awards regularly at CA, Clio and New York Fest. There’s Sunil Thoppil of Cochin office, who has masterminded the Malayala Manorama and Pondicherry Tourism campaigns, which are superb works by any standard. Then, our Mumbai office recently recruited Viren Kamdar, formerly an associate creative director from McCann, and Amish Chinai, who was a creative director at BBDO. You might say, things are looking good.

Going by the strong outdoor presence in Mumbai, thanks to BPL Mobile and Jaaved Jaffrey’s network campaign, in particular, and also Samsonite, we seem to be getting calls from mid-level and junior creatives on a daily basis. That’s the vital, energy level where fresh ideas come from and we are sparing no effort in putting that right.

I too am a recent addition to the mix and hopefully a positive addition at that. All the key creative people just met at Lonavla to discuss what we called TNL – The Next Level. Some excellent ideas came up, ready for action.

In the Asia-Pacific region, TBWA has just picked up the Regional Network of the Year. It's no mean feat for a network that’s relatively so young. The Office of the Year went to TBWASingapore. And, we’ve just heard that TBWA has picked up an even bigger one – perhaps the biggest one – Ad Age’s Global Network of the Year. The best agency network on planet Earth has to be a pretty passionate one too, I would imagine.

As a young network, TBWA is at an exciting, exploratory stage of life. In spite of the formal tools of Disruption, Connections and so on, you sense a throb of excitement about doing great advertising. Which is different from some of the older, ‘we-have-cracked-it-all’ sort of agencies who end up churning pompous, boring work.

TBWA’s plans for the region include the raising of standards of Asian TV commercials in a general sense to bring it up at par with the US and Europe. Now, this is very much in line with our own ambitions for TBWAIndia. John Hunt, the worldwide CD, is a practical creative person – not given to theorizing and faff. While I can’t obviously share the initiatives for the region in a public forum, I can say this much: The support from the TBWA offices across the world is real and extensive. In any case, these days, China and India seem to be prominent on everyone’s map of the world.

Beyond a point, the whole thing is silly. Yet, I must say I am tolerant of the so-called scam ads within limits. It's a celebration of craftsmanship as all awards in any field are. Never mind if millions of people didn’t get to see all the stuff that juries get to see. As a colleague puts it, what can be a greater scam than a dull and safe ad? You probably spent more time and effort buffering it and back-fitting it, making more Powerpoint slides and selling it to the client.

In my book, it’s okay to go to a client and tell him, “Listen, we’ve done some honest to goodness work for the last 10 months or so. Now let me have my fun. Support me on this ad. It will probably win some metal or paper somewhere and we’ll all feel good about it.”

It’s a relationship thing – first you give, then you ask. And, in that order. I am against forming systems and getting into hiring teams just to deliver awards. Then, it seems as though clients are there just to subsidise your creative trip. That is excessive, self-serving and bound to destroy.

Awards are fun things; they shouldn’t become extreme things. Ideally, of course, I’d like to win on every campaign I touch, but that’s like wishing for 6 sixes in an over every time.

Great work is all about unexpected relevance. That won’t change in a million years.

I look up to some stunning ideas that TBWA have come up with in the region. These are really hard to beat stuff. The famous adidas billboard in Tokyo – which put two live players some hundred feet above the ground, tied to a rope and playing soccer – immediately comes to mind.

The funny thing is, outside of a few hundred people in downtown Tokyo, millions around the world heard of it on their car radios, saw it on their TV channels, on the Net and in newspapers. So was it just a hoarding that the agency created? Or, was it really a TV commercial and a print ad too?

To my mind, great work has to be about big or popular brands, talking to millions of people. Not tricky stuff on posters and DMs that you hope will fool your peers into thinking you must be creative.

In India, we did this hugely successful and disruptive stuff with Jaaved Jaffrey for BPL Mobile’s network campaign. Yes, we did it only on hoardings and only in Mumbai, but the work stood out. Then, there's some noticeable, outdoor work for Samsonite laptop bags, that is currently on throughout the country. We’re tightening up on TV production and there’s this big desire to emulate TBWA’s achievements in the region.

Frankly, I’ve never been too much of a fan of planning in practice, if only out of an innate dread of jargon-spouting planners. Yet, when you talk of Disruption – TBWA’s proprietary planning tool – you have to admit it’s mind-blowing. Disruption is not about destruction, it’s about creation. And it’s a practical, do-able thing for ongoing brands. It's not something that looks good on slides, or is good for pitches.

Benny Thomas, an ex-CD from Lowe, is our national head for planning. With his creative background and a bit of missionary zeal, he’s the man of the moment. Truly, Disruption and Connections is an exciting development that our clients are getting introduced to and they can’t have enough of the stuff. The results will show soon.

Big brands, bold campaigns. Nothing less. It’s the same for every agency, including O&M.