<FONT COLOR="#FF0033"><B>Guest Article:</B></FONT> Mandeep Khurana: ‘My early days in advertising’

Mandeep Khurana

Dentsu Marcom

This has nothing to do with any trend in advertising or with consumer behavior. This is just something that I felt strongly about during my early days of being a so-called creative guy, a personal thought on situations that I feel are encountered by all of us in the early stages (I can’t comment for the veterans).

It’s about the time when a lean patch hit me. Suddenly, the world around became a completely unknown face. I started drawing negative conclusions from everything I saw. A signal turning red, which, in my springtime, I would have thought to mean ‘Stop, there’s an idea in the corner, find it’, all of a sudden grew to connote, ‘It’s all over, the fuel is over, just quit’.

It was a peculiar period. Even the best of pals detached themselves in search of greener pastures, looking on me as a barren field that has been harvested to its limit. It was a phase when everything seemed to be so normal, yet disturbing, when even the smallest of jobs took their toll on me and when the ideas just went on strike, behaving just the way low-paid workers do when not paid, as per Maslow’s Need Hierarchy theory. ‘What to do’ was the million dollar question. How to get the old knack back? How to stop the leak in the bucket?

These were the questions to which I needed to find solutions.

Well, as I found, the solution is simple. Stop looking for solutions. Yes, I mean it. Because the deeper you go into this, the deeper it’s gonna be. I’ll try and explain it with a simple incident that worked for me as a cure.

I was strolling in the afternoon when I noticed my shadow in front of me. I increased my pace just to find it teasing me. It played on my patience. And the more I ran in its direction, the more the misery I caused myself. I thought of the shadow as an idea for a while, which I was chasing without any possibility of getting close to it.

Then what to do? It clicked suddenly. I did just the opposite – I turned my back on it. Just walked in the opposite direction and watched the shadow follow me instead.

I had the answer. I took a break from posing as ‘the’ creative guy. Just lived life being everything but creative. Thought of myself as a CA or a white-collared professional.

Lived life as it came. And after some time, nothing affected me. And after I no longer thought of myself as being a paid creative any more and I felt there was no work that had ‘Compulsory’ attached to it, it was time to return. Trust me, the ideas floated, the mind worked and advertising was a passion reignited. The tank was brimming once again with fuel. All of a sudden, all the Cannes, One Shows and D&ADs seemed to be just a snatch away.

If all that I have rubbished here made some sense to you (again, just the people at my level in the hierarchy), then it’s time to take a break, go on a vacation and chill. If I end it with a punch line, then let’s say, ‘Just do it’ (no full stop at the end as this is just the beginning).

(The writer is a copywriter with Dentsu Marcom. You can write to him at mandeep@dentsuind.com)

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