‘There are so many shampoos in the market, you’ll lose hair wondering which one is the best for your pate!’

The Basic lesson to be grasped in advertising, as in any other form of communication, is to know who you are talking to (the concept of “target group”); for, you can say the most brilliant of things to the wrong audience – and it won’t work.

For example, the following joke can fall flat if cracked before the wrong target group:

“Mother, how do lions make love?”

“I don’t know, dear, your father’s friends are all Rotarians.”

Mr. Bharat Dabholkar, well-known adman and theatre personality, revealed at the last meeting that this joke almost brought the house down on at least 300 occasions. But one night it fell flat when it was retold at a programme sponsored by the Lions Club of Nariman Point!

Introduced by Programme Chairman Nanik Rupani as the undisputed “King of Satire”, Mr. Dabholkar, who is the head of Publicis-Zen, one of Bombay’s leading advertising agencies, was speaking on “Humour in

He was gently told that the words “By Order” would be like a red rag to habitual offenders. They would say, “Okay, let’s see how you catch us; you can catch me and fine me or put me behind bars. But how will you catch me? I will spit and run away, I will urinate and run away.”

And since the police force lacked sufficient staff to hang around every street corner, the campaign would fail. So the better thing would be to embarrass the people dirtying the city by writing, “This is a place for donkeys to urinate”. The ad agency said that people would laugh at anybody who urinated in public.

A few such boards were put up on a trial basis, but then Dr. Pasricha was transferred, “not because of this hoarding, but for other reasons”.

Mr. Dabholkar stressed that “when you want to communicate something, don’t do it the way you want to do it, find out how the person you are communicating with is going to receive it. If you do it from his point of view – advertising always works”.

Turning to another misunderstood concept in advertising, that of creativity, he said many people believed that there was nothing creative about advertising. There was a product to sell, people had to be told its price, what it did and where it was available.

It might have been so once upon a time, but now things had changed.

“Take any product… take shampoos. In the olden days, when you wanted to wash your hair you just went out and bought a shampoo. Today, you don’t get normal shampoos any more. You get shampoos for dry hair, you get shampoos for dry hair with dandruff, shampoos for extra dry hair with stronger dandruff, shampoos for oily hair…

“You would be standing in a shop and wondering, what exactly have I got? Do I have dry hair with dandruff or extra dry hair with strong dandruff? You worry so much, your hair starts falling and you don’t need shampoos!

“Speaking of shampoos, you don’t get normal shampoos, you get shampoos with egg, shampoos with proteins, lime, lemon, vitamins. I feel that today shampoos are so healthy that you are better off drinking them rather than putting them on your head.”

It was this plethora of products that created the need for advertising campaigns to differentiate them.

Admen all over the world took recourse to humour so that people would recall their campaigns with a smile.

Mr. Dabholkar then showed some slides of advertisements culled from various sources, though he added the caveat, “Some of these ads are quite scandalous. If you don’t like them, remember that I haven’t made them, I am just showing them to you. But if you do like them, then just remember that I showed them to you!”

He started with David Ogilvy, the internationally acclaimed adman, who mentioned in his bestseller Confessions of an Advertising Man, that few people read what was written on billboards or hoardings. Therefore, there was no point in spending too much money when creativity could work wonders.

For example, a billboard campaign in France had a girl in a bikini and a catch line saying, “On 2nd September, the top goes off”. David Ogilvy wrote that everybody who normally went by that road must have made it a point to pass through that road (whether or not they had any work) on the 2nd of September.

On the 2nd the top went off and the new line said, “On 4th September, the bottom goes off”. After this, not only people who had some business on that road, even those who had no business being anywhere near the hoarding made it a point and went to see it. Promptly, on the 4th of September, the bottom went off – but the girl had turned.

This was an ad for an advertising agency which said, “We keep our promises… If we say we will do something, we do it”.

In a space of six days, it made such an impact that people remembered the campaign and said, if they promised to do something, then the chances were that they would do it.

“This is how advertising works.”

But the moment Mr. Dabholkar said this, someone in the audience claimed that it wouldn’t work in Bombay or that it wouldn’t be allowed.

Seizing the opportunity, Mr. Dabholkar brought the house down with a scathing attack on the current media trend of turning every molehill into a mountain.

“It won’t work in Bombay? It won’t be allowed? If you do it, then someone will come and deface it. And then NDTV will come and then Rajdeep Sardesai (a television news anchor) will have five people sitting and holding a great debate. So your product will get advertising support!

“And then we will have Barkha Dutt (another television news anchor) standing next to it and saying, ‘I am standing next to a hoarding that has been defaced! What is happening to our country? Are we getting more intolerant?’

“You’ll get more advertising (this way) than actually running the advertisement campaign!”

Mr. Dabholkar then turned to a series of advertisements released by the British Council for its course to teach people to talk and write better English. It sent a photographer to shoot examples of wrong English usage and these were used in a creative manner.

The first ad showed a board outside a garden which was only meant for men. But the man who wrote the board wasn’t good at English; he wrote, “Warning! It is forbidden to enter a woman… By order”.

The second ad was for a restaurant which believed in quality. It wanted to say that whatever was served had been tested and that nothing would be served until it had been passed by the manager. Being poor in English, the owners wrote, “The manager has personally passed all the water served here”.

An ordinary ad became interesting when the copywriter punned on the word late. The catch line said, “The perfect gift for your late husband”. It went on to say that if a man kept his wife waiting for dinner and was always late, even for movies, then it was best to give him the watch as a gift, thus making it “The perfect gift for your late husband”.

Mr. Dabholkar said that every company had an image. For example, Pepsi was always irreverent and made fun of everything that Coca-Cola said or did. If it said that it was the official sponsor of the World Cup, Pepsi said that it was the unofficial sponsor.

Similarly, Tata’s had an assurance of quality that went with its name. If it was a Tata product, there was no need to waste time saying that it was of good quality. Further, Tata never did the kind of irreverent things that Pepsi did.

He then turned to an ad for Chivas Regal showing two identical half-empty bottles. Below one was the line, “This is half-empty”, while below the second was written, “This is half-full”.

The copy said that “If it is your bottle of Chivas Regal that has reached the half-way mark, then you have to worry that it is half-empty. But if you are visiting a friend and his bottle reaches the half-way mark, you don’t say that it is half-empty, you say that it is half-full – and you can keep drinking your friend’s whisky”.