By Piyush Gupta
Creative Director, Lowe Lintas & Partners
Portfolio Night 12’ in the cricketing terminology was like a wide ball outside the off stump. It was my second day at Lowe, and Group Creative Director Prathamesh Ghate and I got a brief from our National Creative Director, Arun Iyer, saying that we need a campaign for Portfolio Night. I was thrilled.
After all, Portfolio Night is a brief that every creative dreams of: no client, no pressures, no deadlines, or so we thought. Little did we know that we would be required to write the campaign, get it approved and produce it, all in a short period of time. We took it as a challenge.
We started work on what seemed like a tough brief and a really tight deadline to work around. But the toughest part was to do something that’s not been done before. Portfolio Night happens across the world and some really fantastic work has happened on it, both in India and outside.
We clearly didn’t want to do ads on industry stereotypes. So we put on our thinking caps and got down to cracking the brief. The following day, while brainstorming with our ECD Amar Singh, we stumbled upon this simple insight, that every man has a ‘tell’. Every person subconsciously reacts to ideas and thoughts in his trademark style, depending on whether he likes it or not. We felt this was a perfect thing to talk about especially since our primary audience was that young, hopeful, naïve creative guy who wanted to crack these tough, sometimes diplomatic, super creative directors. We felt these participants would definitely like to know a thing or two about their advertising ideals. And thus emerged the ‘tell campaign’.
Next, we called up our industry friends to know quirky habits of the judges. From various sources (that can’t be disclosed for obvious reasons) we discovered that there is a complete hidden body language at play that these creative heads were not aware of, but their teams were. From Rajiv Rao’s scratching of the beard while listening to ideas to Nitesh Tiwari taking off his spectacles when he didn’t like a thought to Kinu (Abhijit Avasthi) staring blankly, we were astounded with what we got to know. This was great material for video content!
We instantly got in touch with Vivek Das Chaudhary, Director at Elements and requested him to make this campaign happen in the fastest possible time. He was naturally reluctant but then read the scripts and agreed to do five films for us.
The rest, as they say, is history.
(The writer is the think-tank behind the imitation videos of creative honchos who were part of the jury for Portfolio Night 12 @Mumbai)
Feedback: piyush.gupta@loweandpartners.com
