It’s a m-ad world

An ad by ASP for India Linoleum from 1971. Pic courtesy/William Mazzarella

From the early days of black-and-white advertisements in India's first newspaper, Bengal Gazette, to Artificial Intelligence-driven commercials that are winning the Internet today, the Indian advertising industry has had an interesting trajectory. One of the most defining moments of this creative movement is the period in the 1960s, when young Indian advertising professionals broke out of big corporate agencies and started their own shops, points out William Mazzarella, the Neukom Family Professor of anthropology at the University of Chicago, USA. Today, as part of the #ThursdayTalk bi-monthly online talk series put together by Godrej Archives from Godrej & Boyce, Mazzarella will helm a session titled Mad Men of Bombay: Revisiting the Creative Revolution in Indian Advertising.

A 1967 ad by Godrej. Pic courtesy/Godrej Archives

Advertisements, in a way, serve as one of the most important sources of history, suggests Vrunda Pathare, chief archivist, Godrej Archives, Godrej & Boyce. Take for instance, the case of Ardeshir Godrej, who emphasised on advertising his products from the beginning. "This practice eventually led to the creation of the brand Godrej. These early advertisements offer much more to a historian than merely advertising products, as they're the reflections of the values that the manufacturing company believes in and the socio-cultural as well as economic patterns of the society within which they operate," she explains.

William Mazzarella and Vrunda Pathare

In the course of today's talk, Mazzarella will explore the 1960s. "The talk will mainly focus on why it is that the 1960s' generation - the ‘creative revolution' generation - was later remembered so ambivalently," he tells us, adding, "On the one hand, they were seen as heroic pathbreakers, and on the other, they were remembered as out-of-touch elitists. My talk will try to make sense of this split in the way this generation is remembered, and what it can tell us about the assumptions that we now project back onto this earlier period."

Mazzarella will also refer to advertisements from the 1960s, such as house ads by Ulka and Rediffusion, and product ads including one by ASP (Advertising and Sales Promotion) for India Linoleum, which paint the mood and aesthetics of that time. "I've long been fascinated by so-called ‘house ads' - that advertise the services of ad agencies. These ads are where one gets a sense of how agencies at any given time want to present the creative promise itself, and how they sell the very idea of advertising," he signs off.

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