‘The Idea brand is like Andre Agassi’. This was the one line brief given by the senior corporate executive Sanjeev Aga, then the CEO of Idea Cellular to his agency Lowe Lintas and Partners (now called MullenLowe Lintas Group).

Advertising man turned feature film-maker R Balki, who was heading the creative team at Lintas then admits that his entire team couldn’t decipher the brief. “We cracked a lot of jokes about this brief. I even told these jokes to Sanjeev Aga much later in life,” he recalls.

Balki uses this anecdote to illustrate the importance of listening to the client. And how contemplating hard on what you heard from the client can give unexpected results.

The agency asked all the relevant questions. Was Andre Agassi the rebel who wore coloured clothes in a sea of white at Wimbledon? Was it the flamboyance of the tennis player that Idea wanted to emulate? All the questions were answered in the negative by the client.

“We were racking our brains hard. And each time we were getting it wrong. Finally it dawned upon us that Agassi behaved like a champion, at a time when Pete Sampras ruled the roost,” says Balki.

This ‘behave like a champion’ line set the tone for Idea’s brand communication back in the days. “We decided to behave like a leader even though we were then only the fourth largest telecom player. It produced some stunning work and helped us say things that the leader would never say,” recalls Balki.

One such commercial was the Idea caste war commercial which opens to the scene of two castes fighting it out in a Rajasthani village.

The caste factor or the lack of it is absolutely life changing. “We could change something in society forever,” says Balki. That led to the thought of what if everybody had a mobile number and not a name. That would eliminate the caste wars forever. And the ad would close with the brand’s popular tagline, ‘What an Idea, sirji!’

When the ad concept was presented to the client, “They looked at me like they didn’t understand it at all. Sanjeev Aga told me, I know you love feature films. But why are you making Idea into a feature film?,” recalls Balki.

The agency took a couple of hours trying to explain what they were saying. But the client was not convinced. The client gave them two more weeks to come up with alternative ideas.

After two weeks, the agency took the risk of presenting the same ‘Idea’. The client sent them back to the drawing board. A couple of months passed. The agency had still not given up hope and persisted with the idea.

“By now, the client was losing a little patience. At the end of two months, I just think because of the complete understanding in the client agency relationship, it put the faith behind the agency and told us, ‘make the film and we'll see’.”

Soon, despite several objections, the ad shoot was rolling. While the riot and panchayat scenes were partly shot in Rajasthan, the scenes featuring Abhishek Bachchan were shot in Film City, Mumbai.

The brand team at Idea was adamant that the ad spoke nothing about the service and will not work. Post release, the marketing team at the client’s end approached Sanjeev Aga with a dipstick research study. The bad news: the campaign had bombed. Nobody understood it, was the response.

Balki recalls, “Aga looked at me, and I looked at him. We just smiled.” Aga asked his team how much money they had spent on the campaign till date. Seeing that it wasn’t a significant spend, he asked the marketing team to triple the budget over the next two weeks and release the 60-second film. Balki couldn’t believe what he had just heard. “In some strange way, Sanjeev Aga had absorbed my adamant attitude. We were both so adamant about the ad. I always believe really great brands get built always when the same set of people at the client and agency end are working on it for some time.”

Aga told his team to evaluate the results post the second burst and then tell him the results. He was willing to justify the expenditure.

The backing from a CEO, despite being told by research that the ad doesn't work, consumers don't understand it, and so on, altered the course of the brand. Needless to say, the performance of the second burst of the campaign came out strongly in favour of the brand. Both Balki and Aga’s faith in the idea stood vindicated.

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