Who writes Indianness? The ad agency as culture industry

When a brand says it is speaking for India, someone in an agency had to decide what India sounds like. That someone is the subject of one of the best books on Indian advertising.

Written by the Colleviate Strategy desk

The artwork in this series is original and shows fictional brands. We have not redrawn any real campaign, mascot or slogan, and no national symbol appears. The 1990s piece beside this essay is a fictional cable-television advertisement. This essay relies on how the publisher and reviewers describe the book, not on a chapter-by-chapter reading, and says only what they agree on.

The book

William Mazzarella's Shoveling Smoke: Advertising and Globalization in Contemporary India, published by Duke University Press in 2003, is an ethnography of the Bombay advertising business. It looks at how the industry took part in the rise of mass consumerism in the 1980s and 1990s, and at several campaigns in a major Bombay agency and what they say about Indian national identity. Reviewers describe it as a critical anthropology of the culture industries and as an argument against treating globalisation as one totalising force, because a stubborn local excess keeps interrupting it.

Why the agency is the interesting place

An agency sits between a company that wants to sell the same thing everywhere and a public that does not live everywhere in the same way. Someone has to decide what “Indian” looks like in the ad. That decision is made by a small group of people in a few cities, under time pressure, for a client. A great deal of what a country sees of itself in commercials has passed through a meeting room, usually one with bad coffee and a deadline.

The culture industry, reconsidered

Adorno and Horkheimer pictured the culture industry as a smooth machine. The ethnographic view, as we understand it from the reviews, is rougher: a machine made of people who argue, guess and disagree, and who are also members of the audience they address. That is why the output keeps surprising the system that produced it. It is also why the 1990s are interesting. Satellite and cable multiplied channels, and with them the number of rooms in which that decision was being made.

What a brand should ask its agency

1. Who decided what India looks like in this ad, and whom does that exclude?
2. Where, in the film or the page, does the local get to speak in its own terms and not as a flavour?
3. If we translated this idea, what would we lose, and have we shown it on screen?

The craft questions sit beside the film that tried to answer them at national scale, Mile Sur Mera Tumhara, and the working questions in regional language marketing in India.