Hasta La Creative!

Aneesh Jaisinghani, an Applied Arts graduate from Delhi College of Art, joined advertising in the year 2000 with a creative hot shop called Dhar & Hoon. He worked with agencies like Grey, Lintas, Bates, Cheil, Contract before becoming a part of Eleven. He likes to keep things simple and lives life by the philosophy- Be nice to people on your way up because you will meet them again on your way down!

Why are you into advertising?
Two reasons. First one- My mother was an artist with a very popular children’s magazine of the 80s called TARGET and then with Teens Today. I loved what she used to do and wanted to be an artist myself.
Second Reason: I did my one month summer training while I was still in college, with Leo Burnette (at that time, Chaitra Leo Burnette). There, I came across a man who used to walk into office at 2 in the afternoon, wore pink colored bermudas, sported a long white colored pony tail, yet used to call all the shots. He was the creative head of the agency. And I was convinced that that was the life I wanted for myself!

Tell us about your recent ad campaigns.
We did the launch campaign for SportsFit, MSD’s gym. It was quiet challenging as there are hundreds of gyms offering the same product. How do you differentiate yourself in the clutter. So we came up with the idea that a great body is not the one that just looks good but a great body is the one that is fit. So, STOP POSING. START PLAYING.
Also, we took up a public service initiative in association with the Delhi Police on the New Year’s Eve to curb accidental deaths caused by drunken driving. We designed paper bags (Bad News Bags) which had Newspaper headlines reporting deaths caused by drunk driving accidents. We distributed these bags to the alcohol vending shops in Delhi and Delhi NCR. The liquor vendor handed over the alcohol bottles to the consumers in the “Bad News Bags’. The ‘Bad News Bag’ served as a reminder to the consumer about the consequences of drunk driving. The activity was very successful and the number of accidents came down significantly.

Were there any particular role models for you when you grew up?
Not really.
Who was the most influential personality on your career in advertising?
I believe that every person that I have worked with in my career so far has influenced me in some way or the other. Having said that, I would take this opportunity to thank a few art people who I worked with and who truly inspired me- Arindam Sengupta, Abhinav Dhar (My bosses at Dhar & Hoon), Nitin Beri (my boss at Bates) and Viral Pandya (My boss at Grey and Cheil Worldwide).

Where do you get your inspiration from?
By looking at all the great work that is happening in our industry in our country and around the world.

Tell us about your biggest challenge as the creative director of Eleven Brandworks.
When you are a big network agency and have a plethora of clients, you can afford to take it easy on certain briefs/ clients. But since we are a growing and a young agency, every brief/client is very important and the biggest challenge is to keep the standards up whether it is a 30cc ad or a 60 sec commercial.

Tell us something about the agency environment. With such a large team, how does that affect individuality and creativity?
We are a team of about 15 people out of which 10 are officially in the creative department and the rest of them are creative in their own ways! So, we are not really a big team! There’s no hierarchy. We know each others’ strengths and weaknesses. And in the end it is just a matter of using every individual’s strength to create a great creative product.

What do you think of the state of print advertising right now? At least here in india, the released work is most often too sad. Are agencies ignoring released print?
To my mind, print advertising has become a game of great executions. India also has improved by leaps and bounds in the last 5-6 years but we are still way behind our counterparts in Europe, South East Asia and America.
I won’t blame just the agencies for the quality of print but also clients who more often than not, believe that their consumers are not intelligent enough to understand the simplest of things. And, in the process of creating advertising for this so called ‘unintelligent consumer’ one ends up creating work that is too straight, too boring and as you said, simply sad!

Pick and tell us about one of all your past campaigns, your personal favourite…
There are many actually! I’ll pick two.
One was a print campaign for Nokia N93i with 8X zoom. This was created in 2008, I think, and while these did not even get a shortlist at Abbys, the same idea and execution, created by an international agency won at Cannes the same year!
The second was a ‘Thief’ film for Samsung Hero phone with mobile tracker. It was a simple idea that was executed beautifully by Rajesh Krishnan.

Do you think brands that win advertising awards, do well in the market?
Yes, why not! Vodaphone, Cadburys are great examples!

What advice do you have for aspiring creative professionals?
Don’t take advertising too seriously! Both, when you are creating it and when you are watching it!

Mac or PC?
Mac

What’s on your iPod?
Don’t have one!

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