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The Dismal State of Training in Advertising

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As a young account executive in the early 80s I had the fortune of having two attractive job offers in my pocket while leaving Ulka (now FCB) the agency founded by my legendary uncle Bal Mundkur.  I had to leave because my success was being attributed to sharing the same second name as the founder something that I urgently needed to shake off, if I wanted to make it on my own.  The first offer was with HTA which later morphed into JWT and VML and second, a small ad agency called Everest.

The conundrum that faced me however was that HTA was going to pay me only Rs 2200 a month compared to Everest which was making me a handsome offer of Rs 2900 per month. Already struggling with having life’s responsibilities of having a wife and my first child, the logical choice might have been Everest.  When I asked HTA why they were paying me less than Everest despite being the biggest agency, they said that they trained people in advertising.  I was later to learn that this was entirely true. In fact, people often referred to JWT as the University of Advertising.

Another stark difference in the industry was that the advertising trade bodies like CAG (Commercial Artists Guild now defunct), The Ad Club and the AAAI were equally interested in training people in advertising. My friend Pradyuman Maheshwari founder of mxmindia.com for example fondly remembers doing a copywriting course run by one of the industry trade bodies with Larry Grant a well-known creative director who set up his own agency Larry Grant Advertising after leaving Ogilvy.

I for example used to run a training program for young MBA’s joining HTA, about 55 of them from all over the country.  The program was called Entre Vous and was held at a Marve hotel where our young entrants were trained for 2 whole weeks before they were dispatched to various offices round the country as Management Trainees.

A quick round up of the training scenario today I think would reveal that:

  • It is nowhere close to what we were doing in the 80s and 90s as agencies
  • The industry bodies like AAAI, Ad Club and the IAA have become solely institutions that run award shows.

Enter a creative maverick called Raj Kamble who had the vision to buy the Miami Ad School franchise for India (a global school in 15 locations around the world and Future Lions School of the year for 2022 at Cannes) by borrowing money from a few friends 10 years ago.  Raj’s favourite story about how educational institutions did not prepare young minds for the world of advertising is interesting.  Raj a gold medalist from the JJ School of Art went for his first interview with the then Lintas and the first task he was assigned at the interview was to do a 10×1 cc ad.  Raj says he had no clue what a 10×1 cc ad meant after 5 years at JJ. It is this unpleasant experience that spurred his interest in advertising education about 10 years ago.  The need for practical on-the-job experience that would prepare young minds for the real world of advertising. While today education is a money-making business like any other, The Miami Ad School is still to break even. But Raj shrugs it off by saying, ‘I am doing it as a passion’.  For India particularly it is good to know that education can be driven by passion rather than money.

So where are we today if we were to take stock of training in the industry?  The industry which was once run by advertising giants like Ogilvy, Ted Bates, Bill Bernbach, John Hegarty and many others who created legendary advertising for the industry is now being run by businessmen and financial sharks.  Their emphasis on profits has killed many things in advertising and training is on top of that list.  A quick round up of the largest agencies might reveal that the training budget is woefully underspent in the hope of shoring up a precarious and uncertain bottom line.

Don Draper says in Mad Men “We are flawed because we want so much more. We are ruined because we get these things and wish for what we had”.

Training in advertising is certainly something where we wish for what we had. 

Amen!

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