MAM
When Usha Bhandarkar taught a terrified rookie that advertising had a heart
MUMBAI: The news arrived at the worst possible moment. Kiran Khalap, founder and managing director of Chlorophyll Brand, was about to address 500 Gen Z students at Mumbai’s Rachana Sansad art college when he learned that Usha Bhandarkar had died. His voice caught. His composure crumbled. He made the unsuspecting crowd stand in silence for a minute. They had no idea who she was. But Khalap knew exactly what she had done for him.
Lintas in 1983 was a temple of glamour. Beautiful people. Alyque Padamsee’s disciples. Theatre meets advertising. Into this arena stumbled Khalap: terry cotton pants, oiled hair, fresh from Chembur—galaxies away from Nariman Point. For six months he clung to his writing skills like a man dangling from a ledge. At Friday’s open bar, he stirred Fanta drops into water to fake whiskey. Lost. Isolated. Terrified.
Then Bhandarkar arrived. “This is very well-written, Kiran. Present it to Shunu Sen.” Sen was Unilever’s marketing director. Khalap had been in advertising for six months. Bhandarkar for two decades. “That’s six months more than any of them,” she said.
She sent him to lecture at IIM Ahmedabad. She found him freelance gigs when he confessed his only reason for joining advertising: paying for his parents’ surgeries. She commissioned his father, a commercial artist, for a Unilever illustration. She gifted him a Walkman (“Increase your understanding of western music”). Most importantly, she didn’t drink either.
When Surf Lalitaji launched in metro cities, Bhandarkar told the client: “I’m not coming if my creative team isn’t coming.” Khalap discovered that self-respect was non-negotiable in advertising. Also: five-star hotels and flights.
Her clarity extended beyond campaigns. “Keep quiet, Kiran. There’s only one real modern artist in India. Anjolie Ela Menon.” Or: “Stop these grandmother nuskhas. Pop an anti-allergen and come back to work.”
After three years of grooming, when Khalap was offered a creative head role in Calcutta, Bhandarkar said: “Go. I’ll miss you, but go. It’s good for you.”
Decades before “bringing your whole self to work” became corporate jargon, Bhandarkar turned up with haldi stains on her jeans. In an industry built on insecurity and one-upmanship, she was selflessness incarnate. She left in peace and stillness, asking others to do the same.
Khalap’s parting shot: a photo from her eightieth birthday, both laughing at a past that no longer exists. “Bye, Usha.”
MAM
The Merit of Madness: How AI is Changing the Game in Advertising
By Ritz Malik, founder, Ritz Media World.
MUMBAI: When it comes to growth in a competitive landscape, a businessman always has to be a firm believer in Darwinism. You either need to bring a better product, or a better price, or both to the table to get customers and scale. Without this value proposition, you remain unnoticed, and staying unnoticed is not something that a brand wants to do.
You have to do all this and also make sure that you stay cashflow positive at the same time. Otherwise, you’re at a real risk of becoming a large hollow balloon that your competitors are just waiting for to explode or implode under its own weight.
As we’ve entered the era of AI, the notion of a product’s efficacy, cost efficiency, marketability, workflow management, and logistics reliability has become increasingly relevant and prevalently impactful. None of this is background noise anymore. It is the difference between bleeding money on traditional media and actually engineering a profitable campaign.
For example, META’s AI Algorithm has finally given us the ability to measure the ‘CREATIVE’ for a business’s promotions. The best part is that we can do so organically. Content that is actually relevant to the target audience gets more views through reach. This tells us exactly how the audience is reacting before we even scale the budget. This is how we have been gifted the ability to provide merit to the madness of the creative process.
So, our process is as follows:
A set of creatives is built for social media
Their performance is closely monitored for reach and engagement.
Based on the best organic performance, we choose the creative.
Make micro adjustments to add a sales proposition and CTA (but keep it subtle)
Publish the modified creative as an ad.
There’s a lot that goes on in between, but this is the basic method for getting it right. And this is just the AI that’s being used by platforms across the world.
AI utilisation is something that has greatly made the creative process a lot easier. As an agency that thrives on coming up with ideas that are out of this world, we have made the most of leveraging AI to bring ideas to life without spending a fortune.
So, this way, the ability to create high-impact brand stories is no longer under the tyrannical gatekeeping of large budget organisations. It is now that merit solely falls on the storyteller.
Now, AI-powered content production and the AI algorithm on Social Media platforms are asking the question: Is your content compelling?. If yes, the audience will watch your content, share it, and engage with it.
And when it comes to keeping budgets down, we can surely say that it holds the capability to execute million-dollar shoots at a fraction of the cost.
For example, we recently came across a creative challenge by a major Real Estate Developer from Gurugram. They had signed a celebrity couple for their brand ambassadorship a few months ago. They were now about to launch their new project, but for some reason, they could not get their shoot done.
What we came up with was to use the likeness of this celebrity couple and place them throughout the project’s feature video. With the help of AI generation, we were able to rebuild a completely new feature video with their brand ambassadors in 2 days, and no additional physical shots were required.
Imagine being able to save 50-60 lakhs in production costs, 15-20 days in production time, and comfortably be ahead of schedule to launch the project.
This has changed the game entirely. With AI, you can now just acquire the likeness rights of celebrities, and you can just build environments and scenarios with them. The balance between creative and artificial intelligence isn’t a battle for control; it is simply the ultimate tool for survival and scale in a landscape that rewards the fastest and the smartest.
