5 Minutes with… Arnab Biswas
Although he grew up in India and spent the first half of his 20-year-long career so far there, the second decade of Arnab Biswas’ career has been at Cheil Germany. In that time, he’s become more German than many Germans, as his colleagues sometimes tell him.
He’s also flourished as a creative leader there, becoming creative director relatively early on. While he’s a creative through and through, ever since he won art competitions in his youth, Arnab’s embraced the leadership side of his role and early in 2022 was promoted to executive creative director.
LBB’s Alex Reeves spoke to him about all this and more.
LBB> What was your upbringing like and in hindsight can you see any signs there about the creative route you’d end up taking?
Arnab> My father was in the Navy, so despite the fact that I was born in a little village close to the India-Bhutan border, we never had a permanent residence. As a result, I spent my early years moving across India's cities. And I suppose being exposed to a potpourri of cultures has moulded me into the creative I am today.
I was always a nerdy kid, fascinated with art and technology from an early age - maybe because my mother is an artist and my father a builder at heart. Throughout my early years, I won several art competitions and was encouraged to pursue creative interests. I suppose those were the early signs that I would eventually work in the creative industry.
LBB> How did you get into advertising? Was it a purposeful decision or more of an accident?
Arnab> An accident, of course! Even though I loved the arts, my senior year of college had a completely different focus. After earning my degrees in commerce and accounting, I went on to postgraduate in marketing. While studying, we had a visiting faculty, a creative director in our marketing and communications class, who introduced me to the creative department. I found it fascinating! The allure of creating ideas all day long and starting with a clean slate every day was too enticing for me. Straight after my master's, I leapt on joining an agency as a creative intern.
LBB> What were some early client projects or accounts that helped you grow?
Arnab> In the early days of my career, every agency and its clients in India had a unique role in shaping my career. For example, at Ogilvy and Saatchi & Saatchi, I used to work with many creative leaders who helped me push the limit of my craft on clients like Vodafone, Sprite, WWF, etc., and that's where I first got the taste of advertising awards. At Wunderman Thomson and McCann, I learned the importance of strategic thinking from excellent strategists and CMOs on clients like Pepsi, Sony, and Perfetti. And Y&R, is where I got to hone my leadership skills and strategic design capabilities by working on clients like LG, and Hotels.com across the region's four offices.
LBB> Are there any lessons that you wish you'd learned earlier?
Arnab> Early in my career, I rose to the position of creative director, which required that, as a young man, I interact with rather sizable senior teams. The logical response was to push excellent work forward quickly, which gave me a false sense of control while overlooking how each team member has their rhythm, struggles and desires to accomplish a task. Therefore, I wish I had understood the value of empathy as a leader earlier in my career.
LBB> What was the shift like moving between continents from India to Germany? And how did life in advertising compare?
Arnab> The transition went pretty smoothly for me, due to the fact that my wife is Polish and has extended family in Germany, and my brother is British; we used to travel to Germany quite frequently during holidays. I was acquainted with the culture quite well, and now my colleagues jokingly sometimes call me more German than the Germans.
On the other hand, advertising life had a bit of a learning curve due to the work culture difference between the West and Asia. It might sound a bit contentious, but the ‘work-life balance’ concept was foreign to me because in Asia, we practically lived in our offices, and everyone was constantly available. On the other hand, Germans are incredibly private, with a stark boundary between work and personal lives. So I had to learn to refrain from bothering my coworkers too much after work. However, I have now come to value such borders after a decade of living here. Other than that, it's the same; the idea is king, no matter where you are.
LBB> What's the thing you're most proud of in your career so far?
Arnab> Since I didn't take a traditional route to become a designer, I believe that, like many other creatives in the field, I experience varying degrees of imposter syndrome. Therefore, as I keep shifting the goalposts, so does my sense of pride in my job.
One thing that has been consistent in the kind of work I desire are those born in the intersection of art and technology, ideally with deep human insight. Some have never been entered, while others have addressed real-world problems and won all the awards available. However, the ones I present below continue to be some of my favourite works.
More than twelve years back, as a junior, I designed a unique set of QR code posters (when QR codes were not a thing) for a telecom company. I bring up this work because I continue receiving requests till date from businesses worldwide to design their QR codes even after a decade.
Another of my favourites is ‘Land of Emojis’, which we created six years ago. An app for creating personalised emojis for Germans, usable across messaging services (which, of course, has become the norm now). Even so, we did it way before Apple introduced the memojis. Consider a project being supported by a trillion-dollar firm instead of a small Cheil Germany creative department and UX team consisting of one developer and a creative technologist. It gave me fantastic insights into the creation of products.
LBB> What are you recently most proud of and why?
Arnab> I'm most excited about the stuff I can't talk about yet. For example, we are finishing up a case where the ‘metaverse meets the realverse’, or we just wrapped up a gamified Black Friday campaign that resulted in more than 93 million sales.
LBB> What are your most exciting plans for Cheil Germany?
Arnab> In addition to helping with the development of creative work, it is my responsibility to ensure that it strategically checks all the appropriate boxes and has a gripping narrative that can be shared on any platform at any time. Since becoming an ECD, one of my primary areas of focus right now is expanding the team's skills and bringing on talented individuals, as I believe that we are only as good as the individuals who lead us ahead. My objective is to keep Cheil a forward-thinking company that moves at the speed of culture since it has always been an organisation that lives on the edge of innovation and performance.
LBB> What trends in the industry do you find yourself ranting about the most and why?
Arnab> I must confess that the term ‘big data’ is not my favourite. It is undeniable that data and the ability to turn it into business value are crucial for our industry because information is power. But data for data's sake is meaningless. Instead, our focus should be on how we use that information to improve processes and decision-making and create business value through creative implementation of that data, which will differentiate our industry.
LBB> Outside of work, what's inspiring you right now?
Arnab> I'm not the only person who thinks that a creative revolution has begun with the sudden development of AI. I am absolutely fascinated by ChatGTP, an excellent new application of generative adversarial networks that has attracted a lot of attention in the AI field and can be incredibly powerful - allowing us to explore ideas outside the bounds of our everyday reality. AI is progressing so quickly that it exceeds our expectations. Since it takes absolutely no time for an idea to become reality, most applications will be artless at first, as almost everyone will have access to the technology. However, I believe the best ones will stick out and surprise us in the coming days.
