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What initially led you to work in advertising?

 

I’m not from the world of advertising. My father worked in computer software and is from the technology and engineering world and my mother is in education. So, they had no idea about any of this stuff.

 

Nobody ever told me anything about advertising. I took a class when I was a senior in college. I didn’t go to an advertising school, so I don’t even know how I fell upon this class. It was just some kooky advertising class, but I loved it.

 

One day this person from Y&R came in to speak in class and she took us through what she did every day I was just like “Wow this is so exciting!” She made advertising sound so glamorous, being on TV shoots, and working with creatives, and I thought “this is what I want to do!” I was sold.

 

Were you interested in media and entertainment growing up?

 

No. I honestly was a bit lost in college. I took a lot of Psychology and Communications classes. My major was Communications Studies and Organizational Studies but I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life.

 

When you’re Indian, the main options are medicine, engineering, maybe law or finance, and that’s it. There’s no other careers that you are traditionally expected to go into. 

 

Basically I had no idea what I wanted to do. But when the lady from Y&R came to speak to our class, I e-mailed her and I kept in touch with her and that is what opened the door into advertising for me. That’s what led me to apply to the MAIP program. I applied, was accepted, and that program kickstarted my entire career in advertising. I knew not a single thing about the business before that class.

 

Once deciding on advertising, why did you choose strategy specifically?

 

My first two jobs in advertising were actually account positions. After working in an account role at an agency in Michigan, I moved out to New York and I worked for Ogilvy as an AAE on the Global IBM account. Once I was at Ogilvy, as an AAE I started learning a lot about different departments and attending different trainings, which Ogilvy was great at. That is when I learned about strategy and decided it was what I wanted to do. I didn’t even know about strategy before I started. It was only through working as an AAE and meeting strategists that I realized that strategy was my true calling.

 

Although you no longer work in strategy, when you were a strategist what was it about that discipline that made you excited to go to work every day?

 

When I was working in account management, I certainly liked certain aspects about it, but I felt that it was very execution focused. I kept asking myself “Why are we doing this?” I really was fascinated by the whole research process, both the quantitative and the qualitative. I used to ask a lot of questions about everything. I loved the insight mining, the brainstorming, the partnering with creatives to come up with great ideas. That all excited me. Additionally, once you get into strategy, it’s such an intellectually stimulating world. It isn’t necessarily about “let’s get a production out by 3PM today,” but more about sitting down and thinking about what is the objective of the project and what we are trying to accomplish, which I found fascinating.

 

Did you have a favorite client that you worked on?

 

When you’re working in strategy, I think it really helps to start off in CPG. I think it’s great to work on a big CPG account because you learn a lot. There’s a very particular, detailed process that these companies use for how they do creative briefings and research. A lot of them do a great deal of both quantitative and qualitative research to inform strategic plans. So, when you work for a large CPG account, you learn a lot about the planning process, versus maybe some other smaller categories that may skip a few steps.

 

I know you worked as a strategist for a time in India, what was that experience like and how did it compare to being a strategist in the U.S.?

 

When I was an AAE at Ogilvy, I came up with this crazy idea of wanting to go to India because I was bilingual and I wanted to learn about strategy there. I pitched the idea and was ultimately able to go work at the Ogilvy office in Bangalore, India and work on a few different accounts.

 

It was such an exciting opportunity to really delve into research. I did a lot of qualitative research, specifically focusing on IDI’s (In-depth interviews) and focus groups. I was tasked with studying the burgeoning market of 20-something young professionals in India living at home with their families. This demographic had this great disposable income that marketers were very interested in at the time. There were all of these 20-something year olds making great money with very limited expenses because they were living at home. So, it was a very exciting project to study this particular cohort.

 

The number one thing that I learned from that experience is that it doesn’t matter where you go in the world, advertising is advertising. An advertising agency in Timbuktu and an advertising agency in New York City, it’ all one in the same. People that are attracted to this business are fundamentally the same. We’re creatively driven, we’re interesting, we’re curious about the world, we’re passionate about what we do. So that to me, was the coolest thing, going to India and realizing it was just like New York. When you look outside the window, it looks a little different, but it was the same type of people and the same energy, which was so cool to know that if you work in advertising, you can pick it up pretty quickly anywhere you go in the world. The language might be different, the culture and some of the nuances will be different, but generally speaking if you can do advertising in one country, you can do it in another country.

 

What defines a person that would succeed in advertising?

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I personally think this is an industry that is great for people who want to love what they do and want to come to work and have fun and really love the people that they work with. For me, the energy and the environment of an office space is so important. I love working in a creative environment. I love coming to work every day and seeing the beautifully designed office and and the art on the walls, and having music playing. I love working with people who are down to earth and fun and who  are tuned in to what’s happening with culture, and I love that it’s our job to be tuned in.

 

I think advertising is a business for people who like to wake up in the morning and go to work versus a lot of the population, who I think does not look forward to Monday morning. I think this is a world of people who like going to work and like staying late at work and like socializing with their friends at work. This is a great business for that. I think we have a lot of fun here and it’s a fun industry. We celebrate life in a way here, we celebrate culture, we celebrate humanity, vesus other industries where work is just work. Here, I feel like there is a certain vibrancy, and you feel it when you walk around an agency.

 

Do you have any predictions for the future of advertising?

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From someone who works in diversity, I think in the future we’re going to see a lot more of that. I think an agency that doesn’t have different diverse points of view is not going to do well. Diversity of ideas is really what oils the creative machine. Having all these different ideas intermingling with each other is what leads to crazy good creative. If you have the same kinds of people, working on the same kinds of accounts, they are going to inevitably produce the same kinds of ideas.

 

I’m hoping that in 10 to 15 years, we won’t even be talking about diversity because it’s just going to be normal. When you walk into an agency in New York, or anywhere, you will look across the room and there will be different kinds of people, wearing different kinds of clothes, talking about different kinds of things. That is the future. I don’t think any agency is going to survive in any other way.