Art of selling fizz in a bottle

If you are a lsquo90s kid you would have grown up on television shows interspersed with ad commercials this man made In his soontorelease 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 oneononeEdited excerpts from the interviewWhat was it like to put your life down in a bookWriting was not the problem The word count was I was supposed to do it in 80000 words I thought thatrsquos a lot But I ended up writing 180000 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 comingWhat can we expect from this oneWell itrsquos 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 experiencesEven a creative solution doesnrsquot 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 thatrsquos 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 donrsquot aim for the 22 wherersquos the valueHow hard was it to break the rulesIrsquod make two films one the way the client wanted and the second in the manner I thought fit Irsquod show them option one and wait for them to say that it didnrsquot have the desired impact Then Irsquod show them the second one And theyrsquod love it If they could understand films they would be filmmakers instead of suits in an airconditioned office making decisions about how to depict a rural community in a village they had never been toBut it workedWe 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 ldquoShut up This is a Gold Spot filmrdquo 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 advertisingBefore that the product was God You donrsquot laugh at God Laughter was the last thing they wanted Because they didnrsquot 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 hardThe cola wars were intense We remember Rakesh Roshan taking offence to a cola commercial that showed Hrithikrsquos 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 Hrithikrsquos 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 usHow did you handle tantrumsThere was this agency representative who wouldnrsquot 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 noteAs far as stars are concerned Shah Rukh is a delight He doesnrsquot mind playing second fiddle to the product In so many ads he the star loses out Therersquos 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 placeHe and Mr Bachchan Nobody in the unit sleeps the night before Mr Bachchanrsquos shoot because hersquos always five minutes early Wersquove 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