Archive for the ‘anant rangaswami’ Tag

The provocation for this post is Paritosh Joshi’s (www.twitter.com/ParitoshZero) tweet on irritating Times of India half covers.

The innocuous tweet flew all over twitterland with all responses agreeing with Paritosh’s original tweet: “Will someone please tell ToI these HALF-covers are FULL irritation? Or don’t paying readers matter?”

You can go to Paritosh’s twitter page and read all the exchanges.

About a decade ago, I was heading the Mumbai and Pune offices of TBWA India. One of the big wins of the office, then, was the CNBC TV18 account.

The team on the client side was very, very small, and the first meetings used to feature just two from the client and five or six from the agency.

Amongst other facets and highlights of the channel that we discussed was the fact that the screen was so ugly:

There were multiple stickers at the bottom, traveling at different speeds. There were multiple stacks left and right of the screen, moving rapidly in market hours. And then you had the picture-in-picture of various guests being interviewed.

We discussed the level of irritation to the viewer – and decided that the viewer would suffer the irritation, even ignore the irritation, because he profits from watching the channel.

Click for larger image

A decade later, a lot of what CNBC TV18 introduced to Indian TV – such as the inset screen with an L shaped ‘ad’ framing the screen – have moved from business television to sport. We see a lot of it during the ICC WC broadcast by ESPN STAR.

The same intrusion or innovation grates and irritates on live cricket, far more than it does during market hours on any business news channel – because the viewer is not willing to suffer the offending piece of communication – because he doesn’t really profit from it.

Try the same ‘innovation’ on a GEC and the channel will have hell to pay; because while there might be some ‘profit’ from watching live sport, there is none, whatsoever, in watching a saas-bahu serial.

Getting back to Paritosh’s tweet, this is not so much about the intrusion by the advertisement as the physical pain of being able to handle the newspaper (and I must add, in fairness to ToI, that every major newspaper sells this ‘innovation’, not just the ToI).

Here, too, the argument of the profit motive works; the same innovation in Bombay Times or a supplement would not irritate as much as in the main paper.

There are a number of innovations which, arguably, are as impactful, without the irritation factor. Take yesterday’s front page of The Economic Times, for example.

Click for larger image

What ad sales teams (and marketers) should be doing is to test on the irritation levels of proposed communication – and to check what can be done to lower such levels.

The half page innovation irritates, for example, not because of the intrusion (then the ET ad would, as well), but because of the difficult readers go through handling a newspaper with such an innovation.

The same half cover does not irritate in Campaign India – because the page is part of a centre-pinned magazine.

Can newspapers figure out a way for the handling to be as easy despite the half cover? It’s looking for an answer to questions such as this that will stop reader irritation – and deliver big for the advertiser.

The first step, however, must be taken: accepting that the reader is irritated.

Haymarket operations in Mumbai, till about six months ago, were housed in three premises. In a move that was a relief to all, especially to those who had to visit two or more offices regularly, we shifted to a large, spacious new office, and all employees of the two companies that we run in India were under one roof.

We shifted; new office, new furniture, the smell of paint, new air conditioners, etc. All was well till we discovered that none of the mobile services worked inside the office.

I spoke to Arif Ali of Loop Mobile, a dear friend, and yelled for help. A couple of hours later, two engineers from Loop were at my office, and, hey presto, I could make and receive calls from my desk.

My call to Arif helped a minority of my colleagues. I think there are only three out of 100 odd colleagues who subscribe to Loop.

As I write this, many months after the problem was first reported, Loop is the only service which works efficiently in the office. Vodafone, Idea and Airtel, for example, work in some parts of the office and not in others…

And I look at all the communication on number portability and I stop and think.

If I were to go across to a colleague on Vodafone and expressed my wish to port out of Loop Mobile to Vodafone, he, the Vodafone customer, will dissuade me from doing so. Because he is unhappy with the service himself.

Ditto someone on Airtel, someone on Idea, someone on Docomo, someone on BSNL, etc.

Mobile service providers have – literally – millions of consumers – and do precious little with them.

Their data can tell them who has been a consumer for how long, who is a national roaming customer, who is an international roaming customer, who uses data services, who has a BlackBerry, and so on.

They know the name of the consumer, his or her address, certainly his or her phone number, in many cases his or her bank, credit or debit card number, and so on.

What would it have taken for the service providers to engage with their existing subscribers and improve satisfaction levels with them before making a noise on number portability?

If they had, when I asked a ‘Vodafone colleague’ about whether I should shift to Vodafone, if he felt special, if he felt cared for, he would recommend  the shift with enthusiasm and pride.

I’ve not received a single call from Loop Mobile in the past year asking me whether I was satisfied with the service, whether I had had any problems, whether I had complaints, etc.

Not a single call.

And where data is available, nothing seems to be done, as in the case with mobile service providers.

What I wonder about now is, who should have belled the cat? Should the creative agencies focus just on entertaining advertising (I like the Virgin MNP ads the most, followed by the Vodafone ads, followed by the Docomo ads, followed by the Idea ads; the rest I don’t care for too much) or suggest that a logical and lucrative first step would be to engage with existing subscribers and raise their satisfaction levels – or at least the perception of service?

The loss due to the lack of thinking is monumental, as many talk of wanting to port out and very few actually do, because when disgruntled consumers talk to other disgruntled consumers, one ends up choosing the devil one knows.

Which means the creative agencies will keep churning out expensive communication that doesn’t work.

Chew on that.

Today’s been interesting.

I open the newspapers, go to the Economic Times first; it’s the budget.

Quickly glance at the headlines, stop and stare at the unusual visual on the front page – it’s a ‘postcard’ designed by Ogilvy.

(Caption from the Economic Times: The battery ran out of the socialist clock in 1991. Two decades on, it surely is an exciting time for India and its hard-driving and globally expanding entrepreneurs. Gone are the hammer and sickle and even the last vestiges of a system of governance that dulled the Indian spirit and dimmed the hopes of millions. Now, in 2011, the Rupee rules, a strong symbol of a new and muscular India)

I forget the rest of the headlines; I turn page after page to look for more postcards. There are, indeed, more of them.

That’s an interesting change from the budget day’s ET’s in the recent past; Bollywood, Hollywood  and cricket have dominated the ‘themes’ in the big day editions of ET in the past few years. Not just on budget day; the agency reckoner has seen this, too. Railway budgets and the economic survey as well.

And  I go through the paper once again, spending much more time than I would on the paper (I’ve never bought or sold a share in my life). It’s been a few days now; the newspaper is looking more and more serious than it has done in the last few years. New fonts, new design templates.

And new treatment of the content. The headlines, too, have become more business-like. Gone is the overuse of Hinglish.

What’s with ET?

Even on the dotcom, www.economictimes.indiatimes.com, we see changes. While the newspaper is decidedly pink, the dotcom version is shaded a light blue-grey; again, more businesslike.

More international?

And what is the need for it, I wonder…

Perhaps because they no longer compete with just other Indian pink papers…

Perhaps their competition, in this age of digital and at a point when 3G is imminent and tablets will proliferate, tomorrow, could be any financial daily from anywhere in the world, accessible by all Indians first thing in the morning, with India focus and an India home page.

I’m going to watch this space; if ET is preparing for the war in the skies, there will be one – and I’ll get myself a ringside view.

And on another front, days like the budget are great days for media products to prove that they’re better than their peers. All have the same news and similar access to experts. Yesterday, our busy Finance Minister had time for interviews with Arnab Goswami on Times Now, Dr. Prannoy Roy + TN Ninan on NDTV and Raghav Bahl on CNBC and CNNIBN (I didn’t watch ET Now as my Tata Sky doesn’t carry it).

Bahl won hands down. If you get a chance to see it (I”m sure there’ll be a repeat), do so. It’s worth the trouble.

DNA, the newspaper, has been in the news recently for two unrelated, but both significantly debatable, reasons.

The first was their decision to do away with the edit page.

In a signed communication to readers, Aditya Sinha, Editor-in-Chief of DNA, said, “The newspaper edit page has long outlived its usefulness. It’s boring, very few read it, and it’s a chore to fill. It’s more punditry than expert comment. It’s become a single-page editorial ghetto; and that makes little sense in this TV/mobile/web age where you’re looking for more news validation and analysis,

“This does not mean DNA will shun analysis: after all, it’s part of our title. Instead, DNA will give more comment, spread across the paper. For instance, yesterday we have articles by experts on Mumbai, on corruption and on the China-US presidential meeting. Each will appear on a different news page. Otherwise, they’d appear on three consecutive edit pages. DNA will give more comment in the days to come; readers have already seen it in the Money section, and readers will even see it on the Sport pages. And it will all be interesting,” he added.

The decision foxed me; the greater the competition, the greater the role of the edit page, I thought.

When ‘news’ in a newspaper is already dated by the time a newspaper reaches consumers, it is the analysis of the news and the opinions of thought-leaders that keeps the newspaper alive, I thought.

And editors of newspapers are thought leaders trusted by the readers, I thought.

And the edit page is the one page that the reader gets the view of those he trusts, I thought.

The edit in his paper is the edit most trusted – it is the opinion that he adopts as his own, I thought.

DNA obviously thinks differently.

Not quite, though. Since this momentous decision – taken without consulting the most important stakeholder – the reader – DNA has chosen to carry edits on the front page – defeating their own argument.

Admittedly, the attention that an edit gets is maximum during times of trouble or tumultuous change – but that does not mean that the edit has no role to play otherwise.

It’s like two friends, one better informed than the other. The better informed is the advisor that the less informed turns to, to understand everything from why onion prices went up when they did, to understand whether or not Manmohan Singh should appear before a JPC, on whether Lalit Modi is a crook, or whether Adarsh should be demolished.

Imagine if the better informed, one fine morning, decided that he will no longer be available to the less informed. Or, bizarrely, decided that he will proffer his advice as and when he felt like.

Fundamentally, this is what DNA has decided to do. The paper has decided that it will be available to the reader as and when it feels like – and that’s bizarre.

And on another front. DNA says, on the front page, next to the masthead, that the paper is free of any paid news. That’s fantastic. Can any other paper do the same?

Or, as a provocation, should one ever, ever have to say something like this….

There are two areas of high interest and focus for me, personally, and they are advertising and media. If one had to narrow the latter down, it would be news media.
This post’s about news media, especially television news media.

I’ve been a glutton for news ever since I could read. Our house was full of newspapers; we got all the papers from Calcutta, where we lived, obviously, but we also got a whole host of newspapers from outside Calcutta. I’ve read papers like the Searchlight, the Hitavada, and so on. Some of these outstation papers I read for the cartoons (almost all had editorial cartoons those days), some I read for the features. For example, I read Hindu for Art Buchwald and William Safire, The Times of India for the crossword, and so on.

There was no need to read other papers for the news. There was no differentiated news in those days (except for the local pages). The front pages of all the papers were more or less the same.

The other source of news, in the early days, was the radio. One listened to All India Radio’s news programmes to get the establishment view on what mattered (again, it was just news; very little analysis) and to BBC Radio for the ‘international’ and ‘balanced’ view.

In the 80s came TV, and with it, news television. You also had the news-on-video, stuff that India Today launched.

Finally, with the 90s came news television with Prannoy Roy and STAR News.

That was a milestone in Indian news media. Here we had a private channel which was implicitly trusted.

STAR News and Dr. Roy seemed to be able to feel the pulse of the nation, understand the hopes, aspirations and concerns of the nation.

The happy trend continued with Aaj Tak, and in another (but similar) genre, with CNBC TV18. It was good for the country; trusted news sources are always good for the country. These channels all seemed to understand what the concerns of the citizens were.

Then we had the proliferation of news channels as the cost of transponders fell sharply and as the cost of other infrastructure came down as sharply as well. Viewership fragmented – and revenues fragmented, too.

And the channels started staring at each other…

… rather than what mattered to those who were watching the channels.

On the news front, they’ve become, in a way, almost indistinguishable clones. They report on the same issues, they deliver the news in the same manner.

The bigger issue is in the analysis and the opinion.

They seem to have lost their touch and feel for what the consumers care about and are worried about.

They are experts at post-mortems rather than in anticipation. The post-mortems, because the news in such cases is already in the public domain, are clones of each other as well.

Added to this is their short-term focus – and their inability to commit themselves to a hard position.

Because of their prevarication and tentativeness, they are no longer able to influence or pressurize the government of the day – and, in so doing, lose the confidence of their viewers.

There are myriad issues that the environment has raked up over the last year or two. News TV (and other news media) jumps in to take credit for various exposes and governmental decisions, but, if one takes a long, hard look, it becomes increasingly important that it was not the pressure from the media, but the imperatives of politics, which forced the government hand.

The next few months will be crucial to the credibility of news television as it is today. What happens to those involved in the various telecom scams? To the real estate scams? To politicians who commit crimes? To the high and mighty in the private sector who aid and abet various crimes? To the black money in Swiss (and other) international bank accounts?

News TV has never had it so good as far as opportunities go.

Will they take advantage – or play safe?

If they do the latter, they will be reduced to entertainment channels – without the influence that their viewership gives them.

And it’s good to remember, it’s only the influence that gives them the disproportionately high yields that they command….

Nothing gives me greater joy than discovering a writer I haven’t read before/heard of before. I can still remember the first time I read Colin Dexter, Rex Stout, Gregory MacDonald and Ed McBain, for example. Great writers in my favourite genres.
I vividly remember reading Art Buchwald for the first time. William Safire for the first time. Dave Barry for the first time. My father (who wrote brilliantly – I can’t link to any of his writing; he passed away in 1980), in large part, and Art Buchwald and William Safire made me fall in love with great writing in English.

The love affair continues – and the hunt for a new object for the love continued over the years.

Ten years ago, if anyone asked me what I would be doing ten years from then, I would never have answered “journalism”. My first brush with ‘professional’ writing occurred because the editor of Impact magazine had quit in a hurry and Anurag Batra asked me if I could ‘manage’ till he found an editor. A couple of weeks later, I found that I loved what I was doing – and Anurag stopped looking for a replacement.

And, some years later, came a new job in a new magazine – editor of the soon to be launched Campaign India.

Which brought a new angle to my hunt for writers – an active hunt as opposed to serendipitous, accidental discovery. The format of the magazine needed at least three professionals from the industry to write for us every fortnight – two for Private View and one for the Opinion piece which appears below the editorial opinion.

This wasn’t easy; very few professionals in adland had written. Existing media requested a handful of ‘names’ to write for them. The same ‘names’ appeared again and again in publication after publication.

The hunt for new writers was no easy task. The first ones we approached (and, in many instances, bullied) were people we knew well. After they agreed to attempt to write, we  had to explain to them that their writing had to fit the Campaign India ‘grid’; there were word limits for anything they wrote. While many had written, very few had written to suit a grid. It wasn’t easy.

In the 3 ½ years that Campaign India has existed, we’ve had over 175 (yes, 175) professionals writing in Private View; about 80 who have written the Opinion piece. In these years, I can think of a number who’ve been brilliant, a number who’ve been good – and just a couple who were – sadly – bad.

Peter Mukerjea was someone who didn’t struggle to write. He writes easily and relaxed; it’s no wonder he’s finished writing his book. Kurien Mathews, Rajesh Pant, Charles Cadell are among others who surprised us with their felicity of language – and their love for writing showed. All of them, however, were, sort of, hemmed in by the grid.

Then came our dotcom. The new medium meant freedom from the grid – and freedom for writers. I could imagine what the writers that we had discovered would be able to do once we gave them free play – via blogs. Tech issues prevented us from truly exploiting this opportunity – till we re-launched our website in mid-2010.

We tested it. There were glitches, speed issues, tech issues – and they are getting ironed out, one by one. We reached a point where we believed that those who wrote for us would get the gratification due to them – engagement with readers.

In the past week, we’ve introduced two new writers in Babita Baruah and Prem Kamath. We’ve had the pleasure of Kiran Khalap and the new-found freedom.

And we’ve had the absolute honour of a talented cartoonist, Nagesh Sirsal, creating a little piece of genius, provoked by Kiran’s post.

And soon, once you discover the writer in you, we’ll discover you.

The last week witnessed, a) the culmination of a Mumbai-specific campaign for Hindustan Times called ‘No TV Day’ and, b) the launch of a national campaign for DNA called ‘Be positive’.

I followed both with interest, as I do all campaigns of media products.

To refresh your memory (or to share them with you in case you haven’t seen them) here are the campaigns:

No TV Day

Be Positive

HT’s No TV Day has been very high decibel, extravagrantly using their own paper, extensively using outdoor, etc.

DNA’s, up to now (and that is important because it just launched) is relatively lower key.

Before I go into the two campaigns, here’s a peek at what I wrote when another media product, The Times of India, launched another campaign, Aman Ki Asha:

When I first saw the Aman ki Asha campaign, I liked what I saw. A campaign promoting hope for peace between India and Pakistan, supported by the largest newspapers of both countries (in India’s case, the largest English newspaper).

And as the campaign rolled out, I grew less and less enthusiastic and tried to understand why there was no buzz.

Simply put, the campaign sets a goal for itself that is out of the realm of the possible and the probable.

In the case of Lead India, the premise was that India needed leaders with intelligence, integrity, capability, drive, commitment and so on.Consumers agreed with the premise.

The Times of India made available various platforms of their parent company, Bennett, Coleman and Company Limited, to promote the cause and involve readers and viewers in the identification of the leaders of tomorrow.

Consumers got involved, leaders were identified. The campaign, from the point of view ofThe Times of India, worked brilliantly.

It’s another issue that I have no clue what the ultimate winners are doing. Are they working for a better India or have they gone back to their humdrum lives? In the case of Teach India, the premise was that India needed teachers outside of the framework of formal education; ordinary citizens who would sacrifice personal time and effort to help other ordinary citizens improve their lot by helping them improve basic skills.

Consumers agreed with the premise and The Times of India and various platforms of BCCL pumped up the volume. Consumers got involved, ‘teachers’ signed up in thousands. This campaign, too, from the point of view of The Times of India, worked brilliantly.

This, too, is another issue where I have no clue what the ‘teachers’ who were discovered are doing. Are they changing the world or have they gone back to their humdrum lives?

In the case of Aman ki Asha, the premise is that peace is required between Pakistan and India and that more people-to-people interaction would help achieve that elusive, much wanted peace.

In this case, I do not believe that consumers agree with the premise.The premise that people – individual citizens or groups of citizens – could help bring about peace between the two nations is optimistic at best and fanciful at worst.

The ‘boycott’ of Pakistani players by IPL teams demonstrates the major issue at hand: politics.

Lalit Modi, the BCCL, various chief ministers and home ministers at various states, the Prime Minister, the home minister, – all of them, together, cannot guarantee that teams with Pakistani players will not be targeted by trouble-makers for meeting political ends.

Cricket fans in India certainly like to watch Pakistani players; any number of Pakistani players are popular in India. We’ve had Imran Khan modeling for Cinthol, we have a number being appointed as commentators on various sports channels whose primary audience is in India.

‘People’ in India would have no objection to Pakistani players being a part of the IPL. Politics is another issue, however. That’s why Aman ki Asha fails.It’s bitten off more than it can chew. It’s taken up a cause, however dear to Indian readers, which Indian readers do not believe can be solved by Indian citizens.

Perhaps The Times of India should have taken note of a global trend. Give me more local news, talk to me about local issues, educate me on local personalities, involve me in problems that impact my life on a day-to-day basis.For the rest, we have Ban Ki Moon and Barack Obama.

To me, The Hindustan Times campaign resonates, because it is so easy to identify with it. On a personal front, I have no DVD player at home; often, I disconnect my TATA Sky connection for a month or two. I find that, as I live alone, it is easy to fall into the trap of watching too much TV or watching too much on DVD, both of which prevent me from other, more useful pursuits – reading, writing, listening to music, catching up with friends, etc.

In this day and age, parents of young children are worried that they watch too much TV – when they could be doing something which would help more in overall development, such as reading, playing outdoor, etc.

To help you stay away from TV, HT negotiated with a number of restaurants and entertainment outlets for discounts that readers could receive on the day.

On No TV Day, I watched TV. I watched the FA Cup on Sony Pix, I followed developments in Egypt on BBC and CNN. I know a lot of people who were aware of the No TV Day campaign – and yet watched a lot of TV.

And yet, I’ll say the No TV Day campaign was an unqualified success. While many of those who were aware of the campaign would have, like I did, watched TV, they would be as aware of the dangers that watching too much TV present. Which is important.

Many on twitter ridiculed the campaign, first asking what the campaign would achieve and then going on to answer the question – saying nothing would be achieved.

It was not a campaign that would change the world as we know it. It would not bring peace to the Middle East, not even to Kashmir, not even to a Naxal affected village in interior Maharashtra.

But it would remind those who saw the campaign that watching too much TV was, simply, not a good idea.

Now we come to DNA’s India Positive campaign.
The announcement was through a full page false cover in DNA. Long copy ad, and I’m a sucker for long copy. Fundamentally, it tells us of all the achievements by Indians and India that we should feel positive about.

The trouble is, many of the achievements that the campaign highlights are older than the hills – such as being responsible for ‘originating’ calculus, trigonometry and algebra.
Some are tenuous – ‘Indian scientists have created a solar-powered touch screen computer cheaper than an iPad’. We have? What’s it called? Have you seen it? Do you know anyone who uses one?

The one that gets my goat is a statement saying ‘9 Nobel Prize winners have been Indians’. Nine? Who the hell were they? So I go to wikipedia and check it out. It says “Nine Indian citizens or people of Indian origin have been honoured to date, but only three of these are or were Indian citizens, and seven of Indian origin.”

Nitpicking aside (actually these are more than nits), the campaign does not even achieve ‘feel-good’. Most of the achievements of the country described in the campaign pale in significance when compared to global achievements. And more contemporary achievements are required to make one feel positive about the current and the immediate future.

And it is this lack of true achievement which will make it difficult to be ‘positive’ based on all that the campaign says about us.

It’s beyond Aman ki Asha. If that was a campaign which fails because it makes it impossible for me to believe it would achieve anything, this one fails because it tries to do far too much.

Before you read on, take a look at this video:

And what does this have to do with the price of fish? Or with the AAAI or with the Ad Club?

Some background, first. The AAAI and the Ad Club have decided to part ways as far as the Abbys at Goafest is concerned. There’s no official statement on this, but you can take it from me that it’s a done deal.

The AAAI is working furiously on putting together an award of their own. There’s no official statement on this, but you can take it from me that it will be announced very shortly.

The Ad Club is putting their plan B into action – an Abbys at Mumbai once again. There’s no official statement on this, but you can take it from me that it will be announced very shortly, too.

Unconnected to this. Many regulars on twitter were disgusted with, and amused by, the decisions of major Film Awards shows in India. They tweeted about it and discovered that there were many thousand disgruntled film lovers in India on twitter as well. Someone set the ball rolling and suggested a twitter award for Indian films. It started as a trickle, then became a wave and then, finally, a veritable tsunami.

Take it from me, it’ll work. The jury has been selected by fellow tweeters, many of whom will not even know the worthies they support and approve of. The important thing is that they have created a jury that they trust, whose verdicts they will trust.

And, in a year or two, the film industry will have no choice but to ‘recognise’ this award. They will support the award, they will accept the award – and perhaps respect it more than they do the ‘established’ ones.

And going back to Joseph and his amazing coat, we have the AAAI staring at the Joseph in the Ad Club and the Ad Club staring at the Joseph in the AAAI. And while they bicker and bitch and lobby and fret and fume…

…someone on Twitter could decide to suggest an award that is more respected, more trusted and free of the politics and the rubbish that we’re now witnessing.

I’ve been going to Toto’s Garage Pub in Bandra, Mumbai, regularly for the past 14 years.
The first time I went there, I was with Rohinton Kapadia, who was then a colleague of mine at Sony Entertainment Television.

I loved the place almost instantly. Unusual interiors. Hardly any branding. Beer on tap (I hadn’t begun my affair with Old Monk yet). Terrific music. TV on mute, showing movies. Young crowd. Packed to the rafters. Reasonably priced. Limited menu. Comfortable seating, if you get a seat. Pleasing service. And, of course, you could smoke then.

As I said, I’ve been going there for 14 years.

• Over the years, it’s never ever been closed for a private party. Never.
• No brand has ever held a promotion there.
• I’ve never seen a fight.
• They ask to see the IDs of younger customers.
• They stopped consumers smoking the day the law came into effect and scrupulously lay down the law.
• It opens bang on time and closes bang on time.
• Their menu has been a single A4 sheet menu all these years, always unbranded.
• The loos are always clean.
• Regulars get seating on priority.
• They stop guest entry if the place is crowded – except for regulars.
• They never entertain requests for music.
• They never show sport on the TV screen, even if India is playing and winning.
• They never show news on the TV screen, even during elections, etc.
• Most of the staff – including the bartenders, the cashier, the accountant and the waiters, have remained unchanged.

“The most powerful brands don’t change.  The ones that come and go are like shooting stars,” says Jack Trout.

And we all think of Toto’s as just a place to drink in, to hang out in.

And you scratch under the surface and you find a brand, a powerful brand.

And ask yourself, how many of the brands that you deal with do the job half as well as Toto’s?

We’ve been crying ourselves hoarse for a long time now, hoping that the AAAI and the Ad Club, Bombay would find some acceptable middle ground. As I write this, it looks like everything has collapsed and that the Abby’s will come back to Mumbai. We’ll hear about this later today; perhaps early tomorrow.

And I’ve written more than a few thousand words on the issues that confront the Abbys over the past few years. This time, I thought I’d let some great musicians say it for me.

This time around, I hope I’m proven completely wrong and have egg on my face and a miracle solution is found in the next few hours.

We can work it out: The Beatles

Husbands and wives: Neil Diamond

It’s all over now, baby blue: Bob Dylan