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5 minutes with... in association withAdobe Firefly
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5 Minutes With… Sajan RaJ Kurup

10/07/2013
Advertising Agency
Mumbai, India
496
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Founder and Creative Chairman of Creativeland Asia

Sajan RaJ Kurup is a man of creative conviction. This year he withdrew from his role as jury chairman at Goafest in a stand against the volume of scam ads entered. But then growing up in a design school was always going to leave its mark on him – even though he did have a dalliance with mathematics as an undergrad, he soon found his way back to the creative industries. LBB’s Laura Swinton caught up with Sajan to talk India’s youth culture, the importance of psychology and why we should learn to trust our gut.  


LBB> What is about Creativeland Asia that makes it so unique?


SRK> What makes us unique is the fact that we don’t really work like an agency – I know it may sound a bit like a cliché but we’ve been able to find an interesting balance between discipline and being organic, between structure and enthusiasm. And the fact that we grew up organically has given us a unique opportunity to question everything that exists. Most of the agencies and creative companies in our industry have been around since the 50s and 60s and 70s, but we were set up in the 2000’s, which means that we are a lot more relevant right now. We can question everything.


LBB> Following on from that, what motivated you to start Creativeland Asia when you did and what was the founding philosophy?


SRK> Creativeland was born in my head well before 2007; it was something that had always been there in the back of my mind. We needed a creative culture that was a lot more contemporary. 2007 was a great year to do that because it was a recession, it was a really bad down turn and that’s a really good time to get out there and do something. People are a lot more accepting of new things when they’ve all been shaken out of their comfort zone. From a pragmatic point of view we thought that it seemed like a nice time to do it. 


Also, agencies as we knew them had started losing the stronghold that they’d held. There was a gap between marketers and businesses. Marketers had evolved and they’d started going out, looking at unconventional media and trying something different whilst agencies were pretty much remaining within their comfort zone.  I saw a gap.  All of elements brought together made me believe that I could probably take the plunge. I knew if I didn’t do it then, I would miss the bus. 2007 was a good trigger.

 

LBB> A lot of the work you create focusses on the youth market - how has that evolved within India?

SRK> About 60 % of the population of India is under the age of 30. Roughly 51 % of Asia is within that group. I realised that situation is not going to change for the next 50 years, so it was important to take a punt on that age group.  But I think it’s more of a mind-set that I’m taking a chance on rather than a particular age group actually. The world is getting younger in terms of its mentality. If you look at how the BBC used to read out the news ten years ago, even though the organisation has got older, they’ve got much younger. You can see them flashing their hash tags and Facebook addresses on-screen. Did you ever think the BBC would do that? I thought they’d always carry on being much more traditional. And that’s what happening everywhere.
I don’t think I want to be a year older than 21 – maybe 25? I think it’s really a golden age mind-set that I want to stick to. You can’t be creative in an old state of mind. 

 

LBB> Since you’ve been so focussed on this age group I was wondering if you’d learned anything that had been particularly surprising?


SRK> Every time I work on a new project there is also something that occurs that surprises me. One that has become evident throughout this journey is that you pretty much grow up as a creative at 25 and then you pretty much stay the same. Even when you’re 40, on your worst day you’ll still be in exactly the same mind-set as you were when you were 25. When you laugh in your most ecstatic moments you’ll probably behave like your erstwhile 25-year-old self and when you cry, you cry like your erstwhile 25 year old self. That’s something I’ve discovered more and more working with lots of different people, and it’s a nice mean, median age group. Our emotions oscillate around that age group.

 

LBB> With youngcreative.org, your mentorship programme and networking platform, you’re also giving back to that age group too. Why do you think it’s important for agencies to invest in young talent?


SRK> I think it’s more than a responsibility, I think it’s generally a nice thing to do. When I was young I didn’t know who to learn from, I think I learned from all the accidents that have happened to me along the way. That’s what has made me who I am. All I’m doing is sharing that with a few people if I can, and giving them a chance to nurture their creativity. You can make these little accidents happen. If I can create a platform where people can share ideas, you never know what will come out of it. 

 

LBB> In terms of young talent what’s the situation in India? Is advertising an attractive career for talented youngsters or is there a shortage of people to recruit from?

 

SRK> India has 1.2 billion people – I don’t think there’s a shortage of talent here! We’ve always been taught to think ingeniously and I think that ingenuity is an important part of creativity. It comes from the way we were brought up. India is a very creative environment. You’ve got to be creative from day one because nothing comes to you on a platter. You have to figure out how to get to where you want to be. Creativity is inherent to who we are.


The only thing is that within the advertising industry, we don’t really know how to utilise that. I think we’ll see that talent being used better over the next two or three years because people are getting better, a lot more confident within this part of the world, they’re a lot more optimistic. The outlook is more global. The next ten years is going to be quite interesting in this part of the world.

 

LBB> Are young people interested in advertising? Is it a career that they see is open to them?


SRK> They’re interested in brand and design and communication. Advertising is something that’s subjective but I do see a lot more people engaged with brands. We pick up a lot of talent from outside of traditional advertising and its incredible how they’re thinking. 


The one shortfall I often see in this part of the world is the execution of the idea, but I think we’re catching up with that.

 

LBB>   What do you think of awards and the industry? You infamously withdrew from judging the Goa awards this year due to scam ads. On a more general level, how important do you think awards are to the industry and, more specifically, what was your reasoning behind withdrawing from the Goafest awards?

 

SRK> Awards are nice. I have nothing against awards – I’ve won quite a few in my career. But I think the credibility of an award is very important. 

What I see happening in our country right now is an indiscriminate hunger for winning. Everyone likes to get recognised but recognition becomes a mandate. People try to use not-so-credible means of gaining that recognition and that has become much more prevalent in India. I think it happens all over the world, it happens in Spain, it happens in Singapore, it happens in London. We’ve all done that in the past when we’ve been under pressure to win awards – you might go to a client with a piece of proactive work and say ‘hey I want to do this’, but when you do that at the cost of your real work I think that’s when it becomes a problem. The only thing one can do is take a back step and re-evaluate where we are. 


I’ve stopped any kind of proactive work at Creativeland; there’s an understanding that if we’re going to win, let’s win it with real, good, brand work that’s seen by everybody. At the end of the day if you’re creating an organisation from scratch you don’t want to create it on fake award wins. I realise that initially it was difficult for people because there were not too many awards that were coming our way. Today we may have fewer awards but we have some big ones and I know that I can tell people what each and every one has won for and that they will remember that work. 

 

That can also affect young talent badly as they come in and think that this is the way to grow, and you end up with a generation of really hollow creative people. They believe that awards are the measure of success rather than looking at how brands can be built. 

 

 

LBB> Over the last few months there have been several pieces of work from Creativeland that we’ve really enjoyed, including the Appy Fizz spot and the Frooti campaign. For you personally, which projects have particularly resonated with you recently?

 

SRK> We don’t have the number of brands as big network agencies have; we have a few brands and so we don’t just sit back and creative direct. Everything we do is done with a lot of love and care. I particularly like the Frooti work. I’m so pleased that we could do a piece of work in India, a country that is so divided, that had a 97% likeability rate. My mum loved it! A lot of senior creative people across the world have re-tweeted it and sent me messages to tell me that they liked it. Frooti is a very iconic brand in India; it’s the number one mango juice brand and mango is a very important fruit here. And it was great to be able to utilise a star like Shahrukh Khan in that way too. People keep joking that it’s one of his best performances because he’s so understated. 

 

With Appy Fizz, I directed it myself. I’m a great fan of Bollywood, like every Indian, and I love the liveliness and stupidity that’s involved. We wanted to capture that. I had never directed a song piece before with dancers in the background so it was a dream come true to do that with a Bollywood actor. It was fun and people are really enjoying it.

 

LBB> Turning to your own career, you started out studying mathematical economics before turning to advertising. What motivated you to change career paths like that?

 

SRK> Mathematics is a form creativity. It’s nothing but cognition and combination – it’s quite a catalyst really. What can you do with seven notes? What can you do with 26 letters of the alphabet? What can you do in a few steps? Mathematics will always be close to my heart.

 

I grew up in a design school called the National Studio of Design – my father worked there and I grew up in that environment. So when it comes to designers I say, ‘you might have studied at a design school, but I grew up in one, don’t mess with me’. I grew up with a lot of eccentrics around me, a lot of designers around me, a lot of creative people and their influence rubbed off on me. I was a bit of a misfit in maths school; I would have very different points of view on everything. Even though I was one of the top of the class, I felt different. 

 

LBB> Outside of advertising, what do you enjoy on a personal level?

SRK> I love music, I create my own music and spend a lot of time doing that. I love movies. I paint whenever I get a bit of time. I’m a huge fan of people. I studied Bach Flower Therapy – I counsel people with psychosomatic disorders, I help them through anxiety and depression. I love people and there’s a spiritual side to my life so I spend a lot of time doing yoga, chanting, and meditation. The mind is my favourite subject. 

 

LBB> Do you find that these activities feed into your work?


SRK> It does, it makes a massive difference. I spent a lot of time when I was younger just watching people and thinking up back stories about them. I think our business is about people and how they feel and how you want to make them feel, how they think and how you want to make them think. I think the most important things you need to be interested in are people and psychology. 


It’s so little about formulas and business per se and much more about people, the mind and the heart that I do see that a lot of what I do outside of work contributes so much more to my work.
I’m also always talking to people about how to protect their mind. We end up abusing our minds so much, we don’t train ourselves to listen to our intuitions. We’re too caught up to be in touch with ourselves, to be as centred as possible. Contrary to popular belief we don’t think with the head or the heart – we think with our stomach, with our gut. If you can learn to listen to your gut very rarely do things go wrong.

 

LBB> And in an industry like advertising, which is becoming increasingly competitive and busy, how do you think people can do that?

SRK> There’s a lot of back-to-back work here and India’s probably a lot more chaotic than other places, though I have worked in London so I know what that’s like. In a place like ours you have to preserve your sanity. It’s very important to pick out a little bit of time in between to breathe. The best exercise you can do to preserve your creativity is to breathe correctly. Sometimes I put up a sign up on my door and hold a yoga group or meditation group in the middle of work or just before a meeting. Take a 45 minute break and just take time to get into meditation. You have to make time for it otherwise we’ll all go mad. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


 

Credits
Work from Creativeland Asia Pvt. Ltd.
ALL THEIR WORK