Hasta La Creative!

?A Mechanical Engineer from REC Warangal (now NIT Warangal). 42 years old. Grey beard and a bald head. Meet Hari Prasad. Creative Director, Trikaal Advertising, Hyderabad.

?Why are you into Advertising??
By accident. Post engineering I was looking at various options – from journalism to an MBA to the UPSC to film editing to direction and having tried all of them for various periods of time, struck upon copywriting which I loved enough to stay put. And so hence, I guess it answers why I am into advertising.

?Did you attend school for fine art or design or Communications??No.??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??
Can’t really think of anyone in a personal interaction sense.

??Where do you get your inspiration from?
I guess that’s an impossible question to answer. All inspiration derives from the deep rooted unconscious, the conscious, the forgotten knowledge accumulated, the unforgotten knowledge acquired and of course the way you bring all of that to solve a communication problem.??Tell us something about the work environment at Trikaal Advertising…?It’s a mix of the professional and the casual.

Do you have any kind of a program to nurture and train young talent??
Nothing structured but we encourage anyone to call any time and have a discussion on any subject.??Tell us about your biggest challenge as the Creative Director of Trikaal…? Nurturing young talent would be the biggest challenge. The thing is I look for people who are self motivated and enquiring. These are qualities that are difficult to nurture and I try to grapple with them – specially with people who I think have promise.

?What about new and young film makers/photographers? Do you consciously?keep looking for newer talent and try someone completely new??
Yes.

?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? Why do you think ?it  has lost the shine? Why are the younger lot more interested in TV??
A new medium is always more interesting then the earlier one. Having said that one should note that most audiences are also shifting from print to TV, hence it should not be surprising that we see more professionals shifting to it. This is the supply-demand answer.

?More and more young people are web savvy and want to work on the internet?or on more entrepreneurial ventures. Has that affected the quality of?people advertising has been getting??
Yes. It does, but is it unhealthy? I guess for advertising the answer will be yes but for the whole world in a broader sense it is a positive.

Do you think brands whose advertising wins awards, do well in the market??
I will answer this with a question. Do you think individuals who get the top marks and accolades in school do well later in life?

??What advice do you have for aspiring creative professionals??
Aspire. And aspire for more. Just back up your aspirations with true hard work rather than long hair or tattoos.

What is your dream project?
Advertising/promoting free market economics as an alternative ideology to socialism (thank god, communism is dead). To that add promoting innovation and entrepreneurship as a desirable trait.

Mac or PC?
Macbook Pro as laptop. PC as dektop.

?Who would you like to take out for dinner??
Alex Bogusky, Matt Ridley and Donald J. Boudreaux to discuss my dream project.

?What’s on your iPod??
129 GB to list. Exactly right now it is 1Q84 by Murakami intercepted with the music of James Blake which will change in a day or two.

The work:

Case Sheet For Apollo 5ive | Year: 2009

The Challenge
Apollo – the super specialty hospital was celebrating its 25th year of completion. Taking this occasion as an opportunity they planned to come out with a service for high net worth individuals which they were losing to smaller hospitals. The issues were involved were as below.

High net worth individuals (specially their family members) did not see any special privilege or service when they came to the hospital. They were treated like any other patients and because of that high net worth patients started moving to smaller hospitals where they received better attention. Of course they would come to Apollo for extremely important surgeries or treatments as the hospital had doctors, surgeons and equipment that the other hospitals could not match.
Specifically in the case of cosmetic related treatments Apollo saw that it was not getting patients because of lack of individualized attention and also privacy.
To tackle this they decided to form a team that would be dedicated only to serving high net worth patients where the service would take care of everything in an almost instant manner with a special menu, special rooms, the best of nurses and a doctor available at the nursing station 24 X 7 plus a registration process that would be instantaneous where the patients/customers need not fill forms but just need to sign etc.
This was the start point of our involvement.

The Solution

After a series of discussions and brainstorming sessions we came to a conclusion that this exercise needed to be just more than a communication as we are not just dealing with high net worth individual (who like a film star or a sports star or a top business man) can be recognized but his family members cannot be.
Hence it was decided that we need to create a card and whoever carries the card will be given the premium service. Additionally as this was a one-to-one gifting/marketing exercise, we could create an exclusive phone number which could be fed into their mobiles as a speed dial number.
A lot of brainstorming later the whole concept crystallized as a package in itself.
The name of 5ive for the card.
“5” as the number which would be the speed dial number fed in to the customer’s mobile
A concept which would communicate the service and one which was “smart” to make the customer feel better about himself and feel exclusive for being “chosen” to be gifted the 5ive card. The receiver was called a “5iver” and “5iver” was defined as a person who leveraged the four elements of nature and made something out of them to benefit the world.
The card and the service was a huge success so much in fact that there were people who felt bad that they were not “chosen”. And many people wanted the card and approached the hospital with references and recommendations.

Case Sheet For IIIrd i | Year: 2002

The Challenge: The client (a new photography studio) had a budget which was extremely limited and he wanted just a one day presence in the newspapers.

The Solution

Any solution had to take into account the limited budget.
It also had to take into account that it would be a single ad.
It had also take into account that it should not just be creative but it should also look creative (a little like “justice should not only be done, but should manifestly and undoubtedly be seen to be done”).
It should also be a creative that allowed it to become a poster which he could put up at multiple places almost at zero cost.
The ad we developed is as below.

Case Sheet For Seranova | Year: 2000

The Challenge: There were multiple challenges that we needed to address with a large scale campaign that would run across the country. Summarized as below.

The first thing was that the internet was new and there was talk of all this “eCommerce Revolution”.
We needed to position Seranova as a company in this space which by then was undefined or unknown territory to many people.
There were large consulting companies like Mckinsey, Delloite, Anderson (now Accenture) etc who were talking and producing papers on this new marketspace.
The challenge was also to get professionals interested in this company from an “employment” perspective as well as clients interested from a “business” perspective.

The Solution

After a series of discussions and brainstorming we came to the conclusion that as it is a new space there is no point in talking about how good we were in the IT space and what our strengths were etc.
We also wanted to delineate the new company from Intelligroup which was by then a well known company of which Seranova was an offshoot. This was a conscious decision and there were people within Intelligroup’s senior management who thought that we would be missing out on the “heritage” factor. But most of them agreed that the “heritage of old IT” in the new space of eCommerce may anyway not be very relevant or useful.
We decided that as the space was new. . .
There were no benchmarks to measure by.
There were no leaders.
Hence we should occupy the space and communicate ourselves as the leaders in the space.
The key here was to develop a campaign that showed confidence and communicated that we understand the new space and we can handhold clients into this new world of eCommerce.
The campaign was a big success and ran for a period of three months in national newspapers, magazines etc. It won awards and helped Seranova position itself as a leader in that space.

Case Sheet For Zagma | Year: 2009

The Challenge: We had worked with Zagma on the UI design and usability issues dealing with their product called FOBIT. A little description of FOBIT is necessary.

FOBIT is a web-enabled IT solution that inventories and monitors all the IT assets in an organization including hardware, software etc. Imagine a company like Walmart which has multiple geographies and has bought hardware and software across its many offices/outlets and over a period of time. FOBIT inventories all of them and presents a single dashboard view of all the IT assets to the CIO.

The issue that most of the time happens is that business decisions cannot be taken or fail when taken because the CIO does not have an idea of his complete IT assets. This often causes friction between CEOs and CIOs. FOBIT seeks to solve and address that.

The Zagma team was attending an international conference where the CEOs and CIOs were expected to be present. And this was exactly the target audience they were looking for. So how do you catch their attention?

The Solution

1. The target segment here is so tightly defined (just CEOs, CIOs and Chairman or Board Members) we knew the creatives/communication needed to be sophisticated and yet clear and engaging.
2. For this kind of target audience we definitely cannot be Informative or preachy or appear to be teaching, or selling benefits.
3. Moreover we need to catch their attention in a snap and the message needs to be clear.
4. And we decided that if the creative can make the CEO or CIO ask a question then that would be truly an achievement.
5. The creatives were so successful that some of the CEOs and CIOs requested the creatives to be sent to them by email.