?Advertising and design need to work in tandem?

Kyoorius Designyatra, started by the Kyoorius Group, is a much sought after annual affair for the design community in India. Design which has always been at the periphery of the advertising industry has now gradually started coming into its own. Its galaxy of speakers usually boasts of many national and international names who are pioneers in their respective fields. This year?s edition of Designyatra was held in Goa. FE?s Payal Khandelwal caught up with Rajesh Kejriwal, founder CEO, Kyoorius Group to understand how Designyatra has evolved over the years, the challenges of digital media and, most importantly, how advertising and design need to work in tandem. Kejriwal is also director, Saffron Brand Consultants, a brand consultancy firm started by Wally Olins. Edited excerpts.

What were the new elements in this year?s Kyoorius Designyatra?

For this year, we had a theme of ?The Divide? to set the tone of the event. The idea came out of the various conversations we had last year about various ?divides? that exist, like print vs digital, quality vs price, traditional advertising vs new advertising, traditional branding vs new branding, etc.

We also added ?Digital Day? to this year?s conference. We have decided to take one relevant or ambiguous thing every year and focus on that for a day. This year it is digital which continues to be one of the least understood media. People don?t know how to harness digital for their brands. It is not just about creating pages on Facebook or Twitter, it is about technology, about how mobile apps work, how can digital campaigns go more viral, how social media can be effective, etc. Technology people know how to do it, but designers, creatives and marketers still haven?t understood it.

What are the biggest challenges that digital faces in India right now?

The biggest challenge is definitely infrastructure including Internet speed, penetration, etc. The biggest irony at this year?s Designyatra was that we had no Internet connection on Digital Day!

Most of the advertising agencies now have digital divisions as they have understood its importance, and even marketing budgets are in place but they are still struggling with how to use that. Digital is more about content and storytelling in a meaningful manner, and using it in a cohesive way across platforms. In India, the element of content and storytelling is still missing. This year, we got speakers such as Nik Roope of Poke UK who are famous for taking the brand idea and then converting it into a meaningful story. We also had Sander Ejlenberg from Icemobile and Michael Gough from Adobe Experience Design, which is all about technology. Aapo Bovellan from Nokia was here to talk about how they are using digital and how mobile advertising will take off.

How has design in India, and especially Designyatra, evolved over the years?

The reason for starting Designyatra in the first place was that designers usually worked in silos. They were always intimidated by their ?big brothers? in the ad industry. They never thought they were important enough or recognised as talent. But when they came to Designyatra, they realised that they are actually a big community.

India never lacked in terms of design skills, however, it lacks a bit in strategy and conceptual storytelling which precedes design. But there are various factors for it. For example, retail opened up in India just about ten years back, so we are still learning how to design shelf space. In terms of pure design, we are where the UK was about 20-25 years back which is mainly in terms of retail, corporate environment, etc. But for the evolution of design, we will take just about five years to reach where they are now.

As far as Designyatra is concerned, the biggest highlight is corporate participation in the last two years. This year we had over 260 delegates from corporates such as ITC, Titan, Himalaya Drugs, Godrej, Kotak Mahindra, etc. Last year there were about 160 corporate delegates and before that about 80. This shows that clients have started understanding this domain. A lot of restrictions that design agencies face are in terms of clients not understanding the domain and thus not allocating sufficient budgets. But that is changing now.

Do you think it is important for design units to work in conjunction with ad agencies?

Yes, it is. That relationship has already started evolving. Most advertising agencies today have a design cell. When advertising agencies realised that advertising and design are two different things, they started the design cells. I think they both need to work in tandem. Corporates need to realise they need to first work with design cells and then what comes out of it should go to advertising to follow up.

Kyoorius magazine invites a lot of submissions from young designers. How has their quality evolved over the years?

The major difference between designers 8-9 years back and the designers of today is that the former did not have a huge exposure to digital media. The young ones today have a lot of exposure to the Internet, they are browsing all the time, they join various Facebook groups, they shoot articles. For example, Pentagram launched a new identity recently and there was a whole brief about how and why they did that on their page. So the young designers? design knowledge and conceptual skills are much more evolved. Also, to an extent, conferences such as Designyatra help them evolve as we can connect students to various speakers. This has also opened up their minds.