My (M)advertising life.

In the third year of my engineering course I decided that a career anywhere in the vicinity of a machine was not my cup of tea. A chance reading of David Ogilvy’s “Confessions of an Advertising Man” was like seeing The Light. The day I got my degree I said good bye to engineering.

I had no idea on how to go about getting a job in an advertising agency. I looked up the Bangalore telephone directory and sent off my bio-data to all the ad agencies listed there. I was called for an interview by three of them. The first two were washouts.

The third one was one of the larger ones in India. Coincidentally, they were looking for an engineer to handle the advertising of a public sector electronics behemoth. The manager in his innocence presumed that all engineers have technical knowledge of every stream. As a mechanical engineer my knowledge was restricted to an elective in the final year where it was sufficient to read “Electronics made easy” to pass the exam. Added to that was some gems I picked up from my father who had retired from All India Radio. So I joined that agency as an Electronics expert.

My start was inauspicious. As per my appointment letter I was to join on May 1.All dolled up I reported to the office and found it was locked. It was a public holiday.

It is a misconception that an advertising career is glamorous. We printed the annual report for a hydraulics company in Peenya. Unfortunately, in our proof-reading we forgot an important underline on the P&L page. My colleagues and I sat the whole night manually inking that line in 4000 copies.

The most embarrassing proof-reading mistake was in an ad we released for a large steel company on Old Madras Road. The tender was for two 100 tonne ladles. The word came out as ‘ladies’ instead. We had to release the ad once again at our cost after rectification.

We had been assigned the task of launching an anti-pimple cream by a multi-national pharma company. We discovered a pretty young model who later married a now absconding liquor tycoon. We called in experts from our Bombay office to help with the media plan. I was told to make a booking at The West End for Mr. C. N. Kumar and Mrs. A. Kumar. Being an overly smart guy I booked a double room. To my chagrin I found that they were not related to one another at all.

Sometime later I sort of joined the world of modeling. We won the account of launching the soft drink “Torino”. The art director had to depict visually the slogan “Reach out for a Torino”. To save money on hiring an external model I was asked to stretch out my hand and a bottle was later superimposed on that. For several months after that I claimed that mine was the hand that launched a million bottles.

By this time I realized that it was more comfortable sitting on the client side of the table. So it was good bye to my ad agency life.