Waiting for Godot

Earlier today, I blogged on campaignindia.in about the desperate search amongst digital advertising agencies in India to identify a creative messiah and how it may be a fundamentally flawed search. Please do read and share thoughts / feedback.

3 Idiots and the new Hindu growth rate

Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines, written in the mid 80’s has a section which very evocatively brings out the quiet desperation of a newly emerging middle class to not slip back into destitution. I read it over 20 years back and it still resonates. It talks of the writer as a young school boy who is visiting his not-so-well off relatives in a poorer part of Calcutta and from their balcony he looks out at the shanties and ramshackle landscape around him:

It’s true of course that I could not see that landscape or anything like it from my own window, but its presence was palpable everywhere in our house; I had grown up with it. It was that landscape that lent the note of hysteria to my mother’s voice when she drilled me for my examinations; it was to those slopes she pointed out when she told me that if I didn’t study hard I would end up over there, that the only weapon people like us had was our brains and if we didn’t use them like claws to cling to what we’d got, that was where we’d end up, marooned in that landscape: I knew perfectly well that all it would take was a couple of failed examinations to put me where our relative was, in permanent proximity to that blackness: that landscape was the quicksand that seethed beneath the polished floors of our house; it was that sludge which gave our genteel decorum its fine edge of frenzy.

And this context is what probably led a generation of the more fortunate urban, middle class kids to slog their backsides off in schools and colleges all over the country. And that in turn helped them do well enough to buy their homes on mortgage, marry, have children and make those poor kids go through a similar rigmarole so that they in turn don’t fall into that ‘sludge’. While the thoughtless scramble to conform and make the kids mug their way through school is not very edifying, it’s important to understand the background against which this happens. And while we all decry this method of education by rote – which has been given a strong collective voice by 3 Idiots – we must also remember that it’s the same education system that has at least given us the perspective to understand this issue and hopefully address it. I dare say, it has also helped us to become better engineers, managers and contributed in no small measure to a new, more enviable Hindu rate of growth.

What Matters Now

Seth Godin has a very interesting and provocative e-book, ‘What matters now’ (free to download - scribd version here). It’s a collaborative effort involving a lot of people from different fields who share what occupies their minds as they move into the New Year.

I particularly liked Seth’s thought of Generosity; as he says ‘in the digital world, the gift I give you almost always benefits me more than it costs’. Another one I liked a lot was Tim O’Reilly’s idea of Government 2.0
One thought that I missed (at least overtly, though many have touched upon it) is the idea of ‘personal’. I believe we are moving towards a time when we will increasingly be communicating one-to-one or one-to-few rather than the one-to-many that we have become so used to.

This is of course partly driven by more personal means of communicating and touching people; but more fundamentally it harks back to one of our very primal need to connect with individuals as much as with larger systems. This could mean many people and marketers may have to re-set their
expectations from their marketing initiatives. It may mean being happy with a handful of very strong connections rather than thousands of weak connections.

Very similar to the game of oneupmanship played out in the early days of social networks where the race was to have more friends in your networks. And now as we know, people are rushing to de-friend inane, long friend lists.

Salesman in my friend feed

Social media and how to make meaningful use of it in marketing terms is a subject of extensive debate. Like with anything new, there are constant experiments in this space and the blogosphere is filled with practices, observations and learnings.

Manish Mehta of Dell brings an extremely valuable perspective to this subject in this post which appeared in today's HuffPost. He makes the fundamental point that trying to use social media to further business strategy is approaching the issue from the wrong side of the stick. Social media, he says is a mean to determine the business strategy rather than furthering it. Like any good insight, what a simple and elegant thought.

Brands often approach this space salivating at the prospect of engaging with a more evolved, involved and (possibly) articulate bunch of people. But the moment we enter the midst of this crowd we start marketing ourselves, frequently in a crass manner, occasionally with some panache. The problem is, nobody likes an in-your-face sales pitch in a social space. Nobody likes the time-share people who pulverize them with two hours of spiel.

This social space can be infinitely more useful if it's seen as a forum to hear as much as to talk; to engage more than to sell. Finally it's about relating to people in this space at a 'human' level. Not exactly rocket science. As Manish says in his post, that's basically what the Mom and Pop shop of the old days did.

Move me, dude

Just came across this talk by Dan Wieden on advertising, ideas and the future. Seems about a year old, but very interesting and straight from the heart - I especially like the part where he talks about passion. It's fashionable in our business (or any business I guess) to talk about passion for what we do, but sometimes the frequent parroting of the phrase reduces it to a cliche. I like his term for it . . .

What's the good word

Steve Reubel recently blogged on words or phrases which may soon become history. Set me thinking of a few more and here's what I thought of:

1. Postcard

2. Carbon paper

3. Cassette player

4. Wall calendar

And the one I'll miss the most if it does become history - Novels.

Gita Stores weekend promotion

Just read an interesting article about marketers using bloggers and Twitterers to spread the word about their brands and offers. And some potentially interesting platforms are shaping up to help brands connect with their customers through celebrity bloggers and influencers. In light of Twitter COO Dick Costollo saying they'll soon be launching a 'fascinating, non-traditional' advertising business, social media space is all set to see a lot of controversy and experiments with monetizing audiences.