I wish I had made these

Sumanto Chattopadhyay’s two favourite ads include the Mile Sur Mera Tumhara film and the Vodafone Blue ad. He says, ?I still get goosebumps when I see and hear the original Mile sur mera tumhara film. Conceptualised all those years ago by Suresh Malik, with lyrics by Piyush Pandey and directed by Kailash Surendranath, this ad for national integration played again and again on Doordarshan. One never got tired of the beautiful words, the music stayed in one?s head and the visuals were charming in their honest simplicity. It?s not an exaggeration to say that it became an alternative national anthem.?

Talking about the Vodafone Blue ad, he says, ?Created by Rajiv Rao and Prakash Varma, this commercial is done in the style of a Broadway musical. Many Indian ads have shades of the Bollywood musical, but rarely do we attempt, let alone do justice to, the Western stage musical. The song ?Always on Facebook? is catchy, the dancing is fun and you can almost smell the atmosphere of the stage set, so dear to theatre-lovers like myself. The way the different aspects of Facebook usage are woven into the story of the musical is witty and as a Facebook aficionado myself, something I can well relate to!?

Thank god, it isn?t me

Talking about some ads he does not like, Chattopadhyay says, ? The first Olay commercial I noticed was the one that featured Kajol. The thing that stood out in the film was how unnaturally white the actress?s skin looked. Kajol?s beautifully dark complexion is inseparable from her attractive persona. So when one sees her looking unusually pale in an ad it creates dissonance. Also, the process of lightening the skin in post production removes natural detail, making it look flat and lifeless. Just the other day I saw another Olay commercial. This time with Madhuri Dixit. Yet again the skin had a synthetic white appearance. I know that we are a society obsessed with fair skin ? but when ad makers push it to the realm of the unbelievable (and we are all guilty of this), I don?t know who finds it attractive. ?

Another one is ?Parag sariyan wah, wah!? ad for Parag saris. ?It was corny as hell and tacky to boot. I?m glad I didn?t make it. But hey, as I?m writing this, I realise that I still remember the ad after more than a decade. Uhm. Hmmm. Isn?t this kind of recall what advertising so often tries to achieve and fails? So maybe it wasn?t such a bad ad after all,? he says.

My first ad

One of the first television commercials that Chattopadhyay worked on was a testimonial for Dove soap. He says, ?What was unique about the Dove testimonials was that they were really real. Nowadays, clients often ask us to create fake testimonials using models. But for Dove we spent a lot of time and effort finding real women who were willing to try Dove and talk about their experiences. We interviewed them on camera and presented their true stories.?

“The director, Rajiv Menon, had a way of making these non-actors feel comfortable in front of the camera. This was a learning for me and later on other shoots, where we worked with newcomers, I would try to put them at ease in a similar way. The best thing about the Dove shoot was that we were able to capture genuine reactions to a genuinely good product instead of resorting to the sort of puffery ads often have to rely on.?

Sumanto Chattpadhyay joined Ogilvy in 1993 and has been with the agency since then. Based out of Mumbai, his responsibilities include Kolkata, Hyderabad and Colombo. He was promoted as ECD- South Asia in 2007.

At Ogilvy, he has helped build various brands such as Dove, Lakme and Ponds. He was instrumental in the launch of The Economist in India and the relaunch of UTI Bank as Axis Bank.

He was recognised as The Creative Professional of the Year, 2008, at the Asian Brand Congress, Mumbai. He was ranked tenth amongst advertising creative people in Asia by Media magazine in 2007 and fourth in India by Campaign Brief Asia in 2008. He has won international creative awards at Cannes, the Clios, the One Show and the London Festival. His campaign for adoption awareness was ranked 12th in the world in 2008 according to the Gunn Report.