Prahlad Kakkar is as much a man of playfulness as he is of gravitas. The ad guru has had a prolific career spanning decades that has cemented his role as one of India’s pioneering figures when it comes to advertising and marketing. Also, a diver and a keen conservationist, Kakkar’s interests are many and pertinent to the world we live in today. We caught up with him while he was in the city for the Indian Chamber of Commerce’s Brand Conclave organised in association with The Telegraph, in a chat that was both thought-provoking and fun. Excerpts...
What do you think is the key component to an effective advertisement in today’s world?
The issue and the problem with our country is that by the time you become an authority, where clients are willing to listen to you and not just tell you what to do, you are already at the age where you stop learning. Advertising is an occupation like any other occupation. If you are not learning all the time and if you are not willing to change all the time, then you are dead. Your phone is obsolete within six months, your computer is the same, then why not people? We are the youngest country in the world and 60-70 per cent of our population is below the age of 30 and this is going to remain so for the next 40 years. Now, how do you address someone who is 30 years old? Who has grown up with technology and knows more than you do. If you are a manager nowadays with like 10 kids under you, who are below the age of 30, they will know more than you. They can work with technology in their sleep and verify news at a very fast speed. Even clients nowadays, especially those who are above the age of 40 or 45, are stuck in their time. They are constantly in conflict with their children. If they can’t get along with their children, how are they going to get along with their friends, which is their target market? You have to first acknowledge that it is a different animal that you have produced and they have different ways of consuming media. Advertising also has to deal with these people whose attention span is five seconds. You can’t lecture them or talk down to them. You must make them curious about you. You have to tell a story because the days of having a captive audience is over.
Advertisement trends seem to be changing fast, what is the best way to keep up to stay relevant?
Engagement. Either you challenge them to a game or you tell a story. And you tell them a story that is interesting enough to keep them occupied for the duration that you are telling a story for. And if you can’t do either, you have to pack up and go. First, deal with your own children. They do not have any respect for the establishment. They hate the government, they hate rules, they hate what you tell them to do. If you can’t relate to them, they will not accept you as a part of them. Age is a factor because it slows down your learning process, which you should combat, you should learn as keenly as possible.
How has social media affected the advertising market?
Social media has affected the world of children, of young people who have enough money and time to spend on the things they want and like. If you don’t engage with them in their language, which is social media, it will be ineffective. Your team, whom you hire to do the communication, has to walk the walk and talk the talk. You can’t just sit at the top and boss around. You cannot be a boss anymore; you have to be a mentor. In a company, if you are a junior and you have a great idea, everyone will shoot it down because you are a junior. It’s a hierarchical thing. So, if you have a team member who is a junior and who has a great idea, then protect the idea from everyone else. So that at least it comes to fruit. The whole system of management has changed. You are now a colleague, a friend. You are just old and experienced enough but it is not necessary that you know everything through and through.
Prahlad Kakkar at the conference with Rita Bhimani (extreme left), Vandana Ramakrishna and Anindya Ghosh (extreme right)
What are your opinions on ‘influencer marketing’ that is so rampant these days? Is it easier for people to transition from being an artiste to a brand?
That’s a fad, it will come and go. With influencer marketing, you become your own self-made star. An influencer has only a following that is more idiotic than he is. For someone to want to become an influencer means that they are an idiot, that they need attention and so they go on social media and write about everything they are doing. They are a whole lot of people who don’t have a life and get invested in this and will try it, at least once. Every day there are more influencers cropping up and at some point, there will be more influencers than the market. How do you choose? Then there will be genuine influencers. The genuine ones are people who travel a lot, they have seen a lot, who have experienced a lot. They know about food, fashion, of different places and you live through them. So, you follow them to places and think that you too will do that once you are there. The influencer market, it is not like it will disappear. But, there is going to be a shakeout in it.
What are some of the most interesting advertisements that you have watched in recent years?
I think Dove has created some really amazing advertisements. They make people think and talk about things like the concept of beauty — what is fair, what is manageable etc. The problem is that a vast portion of the market is young men who don’t have the balls to find a girlfriend and want their mothers to find them a wife with impossible standards, especially compared to themselves.
You have been known to take a keen interest in the conservation of natural resources. How did that come about?
My generation has made all the mistakes to screw up the planet, purely on greed and now, all our children will suffer climate change and they will have to live with it. They are eating and drinking plastic. Forget about plastics in the ocean, microplastics have gone into our drinking water. We have a very interesting NGO, an underwater NGO with divers, called Reefwatch. It’s about preserving and studying reefs all over the world. We take schoolchildren down. We have found that whatever time we spend on children, it is fruitful. Whatever time we spend on adults, it is not worth it at all because they are only interested for the time being, whereas children take it all back home. They are the future. So, when you teach them, they actually learn.
What is one advice you would want to give to the upcoming generation of advertisers?
First, save the planet. All these activities are peripheral if the planet decides there are too many people for it to be healthy. So, it will bring not only physical calamities but diseases such as Covid. It will cull populations. The planet does not understand whether you are rich or poor, important, or not; you are human beings who are useless and who the planet can do without. The population has to be reduced. Either we do it ourselves, through family planning, or the planet will do it itself and it will be indiscriminate about it.