Pandeymonium by Piyush Pandey
The rules for parents are but three: love, limit, and let them be.
Whatever you say, say it with respect for the audience, say it in a context that the audience can understand, say it spontaneously, say it without fear, say it not to intimidate or frighten, but to delight.
We need to build a community of friends or people around us who possess different talents. People who we can learn from. No matter what their area of expertise. People whose criticisms are constructive. People whose appreciation is genuine. They could be anybody around us. All we need is to reach out. If you add value to their lives they will do it to you too.
Human chemistry is extremely important in the business of communication.
Don’t let the child in you die. He or she is the genius. You are not.
Don’t be scared of systems and processes. There are ways to fool them. I found at least a hundred. You will find more.
These are just a few instances of what music can do for a script or a brand. That’s why it gets on my nerves when a client says, ‘Buy some stock music and slap it on,’ or ‘Can’t we get the music cheaper?’ What is the return that Titan has got out of their investment in the Mozart tune, or Unilever got out of the investment in Lifebuoy? How much is it worth to Vodafone each time someone hums, ‘You and I’? We are a country where there is magical music from all regions. Listen to it. Respect it. Get inspired by it. Inspire others with it.
David Ogilvy once said, ‘Don’t keep a dog and bark yourself.’ It’s the same with clients who dictate advertising. As David said, it’s like they have a dog and yet they are the ones who bark. If the client leaves us to do the barking, which is what they sign us on for in the first place, the relationship is richer—for both the client and for us.
You can take a horse to the water, but you can’t do a thing if it wants to drink piss!
Be it Fevicol, Amaron, M-Seal or other low- involvement category products, the route to making the consumer more involved was to talk less about the functional aspects of the product and focus more on making the product a friend.
The beautiful challenge in India is to search for, and find, the unity in this diversity. You have to look for those tastes, behaviours and thoughts that are common, and which unify all these cultures. Every once in a while, we do find such elements, and that is when the resultant communication moves consumers.
When you’re stuck, search for gold wherever young and old people are.
Big ideas come from the belief that you can fly; big ideas cannot come when you are shackled by research, when you are shackled by conventional belief, when you are shackled by the success of the past.
Whatever your profession, whatever the business, an extraordinary success cannot be the end of your ambitions. You have to cast it aside and target something bigger, better, more profitable, more impactful.
Do yourself a favour, whatever it is that you do, find yourself colleagues you can trust and delegate work to. The more you trust and delegate, the more time you have to spend on things that really matter to you.
Winning an award is not a destination; it is just another milestone in a long journey.
