By Anil Nair
Managing Partner, Digital Law & Kenneth
Checking my various social media profiles has become a force of habit for me nowadays. Partly because of my profession and partly due to the innate curiosity that exists in all human beings about what others of their ilk are up to.
It is always good to start your mornings feeling a little inadequate, on being assaulted by turbo-charged status updates of your friends and acquaintances. Minute-by-minute exotic holiday updates , ‘am now my own boss’ new business set-ups, ‘Every creative person’s wet dream’ feature film forays, a Page 3 photograph with a celeb, or the latest cool thing on the block, picking up a social cause to support. It is an endless flowing wall of cultivated posturing and exaggerated eulogies. All this hyperactivity only made me contrast my early virginal days in advertising. Without sounding like a fossil or overtly sentimental, I fondly recollect the existence of fax memo books - of half and A4 page sizes – usage depending on ‘how much ass you wanted to cover’. Or even the most important guy on the floor, the dispatch boy who could hold your life to ransom, your lifeline to the rest of the world. He was your Facebook, Twitter and Google Plus all rolled into one. Slide projectors which screwed many an account executive’s love life every time senior management had anything close to a big client presentation. We, the other lowly beings, had acetate sheets for all the regular stuff.
Typesetting, story boarding, vox pops, artwork masters, colour separations. And the production heads who ran these little fiefdoms. Life was much more exciting and people tended to be much sharper due to the human factor in the production of the above items and the errors and disasters that could occasionally creep in. Making a public issue pubic and you the butt of ridicule. Advertising had real copywriters back then. Painful masters of their craft. Maniacs who could drive you around the bend, while they took sado-masochistic pleasure in tweaking and crafting their body copy after a good surmai-fry lunch and a mid-afternoon siesta. All this, while you tried to dodge your irate client who had been trying hard to reach you on the single agency landline shared by the various AEs for both work and other reasons. I remember an erstwhile agency legend who was extremely distrusting of the then new fangled ‘devil’s concept of e-mail’, making his Man Friday run and physically hand deliver every e-mail just to make sure his lines of communication never failed.
Or those moody floppy diskettes. They had a habit of failing you at life and death pitch situations where a galaxy of dignitaries from both client and agency sat at a giant mahogany table like celestial bodies. A perfect set up and reason for Murphy’s law to act up. The moment of negative nirvana. The screen would flash a corrupt disc message, a lot of disapproving glares and sniggers, and with it got corrupted any respectable future advertising career. Life then was more mechanical, but much more personal. You did not require fancy sites and apps to help you remember birthdays and phone numbers. No touchscreens, tweetups, pokes, slideshares, GPS, GPRS, intranets or tablets. All you had was you. Things have changed. Irrevocably.
Feedback:anil.n@lkdigi.com
