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by Arcopol Chaudhuri

Mumbai: In an age where parties and their leaders are driven by expediency rather than ideology, how are agencies, used to working with a clear brief, grappling with the task of building a strong political brand? DNA sifts the hype from the ground realities

Every toothpaste worth your teeth has a distinct brand promise: one will claim to protect your gums, another will promise relief from bad breath, yet another will assure you security against germs. They may be empty promises, like a politician’s, but they do have a singular brand-differentiating promise. Indian politicians, however, differ from toothpastes in this respect. They, and the parties they belong to, have a more fluid brand promise, which mutates — from election to election, alliance to alliance, and vote bank to vote bank. What this means, from the ad agency’s point of view, is that brand-building has to be achieved without the one element necessary for successful brand communications: a clearly spelt-out brief.

“Can the face of my party leader be made to look better, what should be the font size on my poster, how should I place my logo — these are questions to which parties want immediate answers from the ad agencies,” says Agnello Dias, chief creative officer, Taproot India. “For the rest, they already have a publicity mechanism — they know what’s to be written, where and how to get the screen printing done.”

In other words, the big political parties in India don’t seem to be thinking beyond the ‘arty’ skills they can derive from ad agencies. After all, they’ve been in the public domain for decades and built brands of sorts on their own. “Be it the socialism of the Nehru-Gandhi family in the Congress, or the Hindu fundamentalism of the BJP, each of them already has what brands like Coke and McDonald’s possess — brand recall and imagery, and loyalists and critics amongst the masses,” points out Prathap Suthan, national creative director of Cheil Worldwide and the man behind the BJP’s 2004 India Shining campaign.

Why, then, would a political party still seek support in brand-building, going as far as to spend crores on an agency? According to Dias, “using advertising agencies for brand-building has become a ritual. One party did it, and the rest of them followed suit.”

Advertising and branding exercises can be traced to the Swatantra Party’s roping in of the late Kersey Katrak, a creative genius, back in 1966. “And then, the highpoint of Indian political advertising was what Rediffusion DY&R did for the Congress in 1984,” recollects Mahesh Murthy, CEO, Pinstorm. Rajiv Gandhi’s strategy was soon aped by the BJP, which brought in Trikaya Grey.

“Since then, the quality of agencies, strategy and tactics used in political campaigns has deteriorated into an anything-is-possible mantra, which defines politics itself,” observes Murthy, a veteran of 24 years in advertising. “There was a brief spark in the BJP’s India Shining campaign which, though much vilified, was at least focused in its message. Since then, no agency has made any impact on the political scene.”

Ranjan Bargotra, president of Crayons Advertising, which is collaborating on the Congress account this year, has a different take. “As an agency, the main challenge for us is not the fact that it’s a political account. It’s just that the target audience is so huge; the entire universe of adults. That’s not the case with other brands, which have a defined and much narrower target audience.”

But there’s another reason why ad agencies struggle to make a big impact in elections. Copywriters have often found it difficult to distinguish, or even make sense of, the brief given by a political party. The approach is very different from making an ad for a soft drink or telecom product. The result: while Indian advertising reaches new highs through global acclaim at Cannes, political ads are stuck in a time warp.

Rohit Ohri, managing partner of JWT, which is doing the radio and TV ads for the Congress, counters that the brief for a political account is limited, compared to that for an FMCG product, because party representatives are in touch with the voters’ pulse and ground realities. “They know exactly what they want, so the agency guys need not do much of research. The best that an agency can do for a political party before the elections is to create a positive aura around it, like strong positive wind.”

Dias however thinks parties simply don’t realise the full potential of creative advertising. “At best, they know the importance of a slogan. But their focus is on the ground-level campaigning. In a politician’s mental landscape, the image of a thousand poor Indians nodding and clapping at a speech is more powerful than an ad agency’s skills.”

Which is why some agencies, such as Ogilvy & Mather, never pitch for political accounts. The agency’s founder David Ogilvy had listed some do’s and don’ts for the agency, one of which was to never take up a political account. A stress on resources and meagre returns were cited as reasons.

Still, agencies pitch. Recently when the Congress and the BJP called for proposals, each with an advertising budget upwards of Rs150 crore, it got the big agencies salivating. “The money is a big attraction,” says Suthan. “And if the campaign is successful, then there are huge favours that people at the agency can run through the political party. All it takes is dialing a few numbers.”