Art of selling fizz in a bottle

Ad veteran Prahlad Kakkar tells us that his book is not just about his life and his work, but also the thought process that drove his path breaking career arc. Pic/Aishwarya Deodhar

If you are a ‘90s kid, you would have grown up on television shows interspersed with ad commercials this man made. In his soon-to-release title, Madman Adman: Unapologetically Prahlad (Harper Collins), ad veteran, entrepreneur and restaurateur Prahlad Kakkar recounts his life and career. We caught up with him at his Bandra Reclamation residence for a candid one-on-one.

Edited excerpts from the interview.

What was it like to put your life down in a book.
Writing was not the problem. The word count was. I was supposed to do it in 80,000 words. I thought, that's a lot. But, I ended up writing 180,000 words. And there was still lots more to come. They [publishers] kept asking if this was the last chapter; I kept saying, sort of. Ultimately, I had to stop. There may be another book coming.

What can we expect from this one?
Well, it's a memoir, not limited to just my professional life. I realised that a lot of what I did, the experiences I had, helped shape my personality. Like Sartre, I kept asking myself, who am I? What am I? Where am I going? And by the age of 35, I got the answer: I am the sum total of my experiences.
Even a creative solution doesn't come out of nowhere; it stems from some memory or incident from your past, because your subconscious mind is a bank of all your life experiences. Your conscious mind is the logical bit but that's only 10 per cent of the bank. What we call gut instinct is the 90 per cent. Logically, two plus two is four, but to add value, you have to come up with 22. If you take clay that you can buy for one rupee a kilo and turn it into a pot that sells for R500, your value addition is 499x! If you don't aim for the 22, where's the value?

How hard was it to break the rules?
I'd make two films, one the way the client wanted and the second in the manner I thought fit. I'd show them option one, and wait for them to say that it didn't have the desired impact. Then, I'd show them the second one. And they'd love it. If they could understand films, they would be filmmakers instead of suits in an air-conditioned office making decisions about how to depict a rural community in a village they had never been to.

But it worked.
We were doing a commercial for Gold Spot once. They had changed their tastemaker because some medical journal had published a report saying that the earlier one was borderline harmful. Naturally, the taste changed. The ad campaign had people asking each other if they had tasted the new Gold Spot. By the fourth ad film, it was repetitive and not funny anymore. So, for the fifth one, we showed a group of college students celebrating the new Gold Spot. A goofy looking boy asks for a Limca and a girl says, "Shut up! This is a Gold Spot film!" The company was unsure about selling two products in one ad, even though both products were their own! That was the time when people were accepting humour in advertising.

Before that, the product was God. You don't laugh at God. Laughter was the last thing they wanted. Because they didn't understand the difference between laughing at you and laughing with you. But it started a trend; everybody was trying to be funny. They tried too hard.

The cola wars were intense. We remember Rakesh Roshan taking offence to a cola commercial that showed Hrithik's lookalike in a poor light.
That was deliberate. Hrithik was actually in talks with two top rival cola brands, and ultimately chose one. And he did that at a time when the other was just about to announce they were in talks with him, which did not go down well. So, we showed Hrithik's lookalike losing the girl to Shah Rukh Khan. We even made him look like a dork, with braces. It backfired on us. Hrithik was so popular that we received letters from consumers, criticising us.

How did you handle tantrums?
There was this agency representative who wouldn't stop meddling during my shoot. I told my assistant to pack up and return whatever was remaining from the advance amount that they had paid. We cleaned up the entire set and I handed him a Rs 100 note!

As far as stars are concerned, Shah Rukh is a delight. He doesn't mind playing second fiddle to the product. In so many ads, he, the star, loses out. There's one where he loses the girl to another actor and loses the cola bottle too. In another, he sneaks into a cricket team dressing room impersonating Sachin Tendulkar to steal a cola, only for the real Sachin to take the bottle and send him to bat in his place.

He, and Mr Bachchan! Nobody in the unit sleeps the night before Mr Bachchan's shoot, because he's always five minutes early. We've actually walked onto the set to see him sitting in a chair, in the middle of an empty set, reading a newspaper. It is terrifying.