My initiation to the agency life...

So here I am, at Rediffusion Young & Rubicam, Kolkata as a trainee Copywriter cum ad ideator. I sincerely wonder why the name ‘copywriter’ still exists when the integral process that defines our work has come to involve ideating, mainly. Coming up with as many creative solutions to a brief as possible, wording those ideas as briefly and comprehensively as possible then zeroing in on the most feasible ones till you reach that winner of an idea that is presented first before your Creative Director and pending his approval, the client, is what we do.

We should all be re-christened ‘ad ideators’ with copywriting or art direction being our chosen modes of work, since the main job of every creative essentially is to come up with ‘ideas’, right?

Going through the work of the likes of Indra Sinha, Paul Arden, Neil French, all three of whom now share space with the pantheon of Gods that occupy the religious segment of my mind, one wonders if they should at all be called ‘copywriters’. In my opinion they transcended to great writers the day they began writing ads like the public service campaign for the Bhopal Gas Tragedy or the Volkswagon campaign much before their literary accomplishments came about.

Among other things, the energy here is unbelievable. It’s a different sort of energy. You have to join in the flow soon enough else you might be left standing on the banks looking despondently at the river rush by and I of all people can’t afford that.