Review: “Not Just My Good Karma”
One of the best anthropological studies of advertising ever written, Steven Kemper’s Buying and Believing charts the growth of the industry in Sri Lanka from the early 20th century. Kemper argues that advertising in the country was largely uneconomic in character until 1977. Companies advertised because they had to, not because they wanted to. There were several large-scale advertising agencies, many of them setting up shop during the Sirimavo Bandaranaike years. But limited to English-speaking audiences and middle-class tastes, their work hardly reached the Sinhala and Tamil speaking masses.
Everything changed after 1977. Responding to the UNP government’s liberalisation of the economy, the advertising industry grew by 20 percent a year. A whole spate of reforms, including the privatisation of State enterprises and the reduction of import tariffs, led to intrusions of not just foreign capital and investment, but also foreign, specifically Western, consumer tastes and preferences. These had a considerable effect on the industry. Unlike earlier, when agencies pandered to more sophisticated tastes, they began shifting to a local idiom. Thinking in English then, they began working in Sinhala and Tamil now. The advent of television, free trade zones, and garment factories only fuelled these trends.
Sandya Salgado’s entry into advertising coincided with this period. Armed with a degree in a languages “and a head full of dreams”, she wrote to three agencies. Rejected by the first of them, she was interviewed by the second and hired by the third. Beginning her career in 1983, she shifted to other agencies with the years and ended almost three decades later. Not Just My Good Karma is an account of all those years. Lucidly written and accessible, it is at once a memoir and a study of a much vilified, little understood industry.
The book is in three sections. In the first, Sandya dwells on her hometown, Panadura. In the second, the longest, she walks us through the many agencies and outfits she worked at. In the third, she recounts what she did after leaving the industry, including a brief stint at the World Bank. She wraps it all up by insisting that she still hasn’t retired.
There’s a deeply personal touch in the first section. That has a lot to do with where Sandya hails from and what moulded her upbringing, but also, I think, with the fact that Panadura, her hometown, is in many ways my hometown too. Sandya summons a melange of personal anecdotes and historical facts. She dwells on caste, class, religion, and politics, and how they intermingled at a time of deep political and social change.
Hardly a defender of the past, she nevertheless limits her memories to observations. Yet she often throws in a comment or two, as in her take on how social class determined where, and more importantly how, you sat in Panadura.
“Those who came for monetary gain mostly entered from the rear of the house, the kussi pila. They would speak standing while achchi would sit on a wooden sofa and listen to their tales of woe… The next social class of persons sat on the steps of the house while achchi would be seated on a chair facing them. There would be another class of people who were not invited into the drawing room, but would be requested to sit in the pila, the verendah of the house, as the drawing room was for special and distinguished guests… There was an underlying class system that prevailed in the welcoming of guests those days which we didn’t make a big deal about but accepted silently.”
These are fascinating insights, and they fascinated me. What’s intriguing about them is how Sandya broke away from such strictures, rebelling against the place assigned to the women of the family. One of the first women in Panadura to drive a car, her mother encouraged this streak in her while “tactfully making us change our views to something less controversial or impractical.” As a result of such influences and encounters, Sandya came to sway between two worlds, of rebellion and pragmatism. She revelled in both, keeping in line with a Sinhala middle-class upbringing while defying the limits of such an inheritance.
Perhaps it’s the advertiser in her, or perhaps it’s how close she is to her hometown, but Sandya’s observations are surprisingly sharp and penetrative. At one level they are almost anthropological, especially her observations on caste and class in Panadura society, much of which make up a particularly edifying epilogue. The bottom line is that they all turned her away from conventional fields while empowering the career woman in her: one reason why she never pursued higher education beyond her Bachelor’s. It was with the latter degree, in fact, that she entered advertising, where she found herself a total misfit.
“I was not from Colombo, didn’t smoke or drink and wore saree — not the most common attire in advertising. Apart from not having any sensational stories about my sex life to share, I had a particular qualification: my Sinhala was better than my English. But what set me apart was that I was proud to acknowledge this fact openly.”
Throughout the 1980s the country’s leading advertising agencies went on a creative binge, outdoing each other locally and even internationally. The results were some of the most prodigiously creative campaigns to emerge from the industry. Handling accounts initially at TAL, then moving on to Grants, Sandya found herself in the thick of it all. Starting with CIC (Dulux Paints) and Anchor at TAL, she began coordinating bigger and more lucrative clients at Grants, including Ranasinghe Premadasa. It was her work for Premadasa, specifically for the Gramodaya project the latter oversaw during his presidency, which became her baptism of fire. From there on, for Sandya at least, it was uphill all the way.
What’s particularly interesting are the finer, little details that Sandya remembers from this period. Simply put, she doesn’t ignore anything. Working at an advertising agency then was obviously different to working at one now. How clients saw creatives and how creatives saw each other made up life in the industry. That is why anecdotes are so important: because it’s the most personal encounters which often sparked off the most creative ideas.
“One morning when I was travelling to work, I saw a child less than ten years old, not more than two and a half feet tall, carrying a load bigger than himself. The radio in my car was playing the song ‘Nobody’s Child.’ This immediately made me want to fight for children’s rights. I remember sitting with my ever-willing creative team to share my idea of developing a campaign against child abuse and they were on board with no questions asked.”
This, of course, was the origin of one of the most effective public service campaigns in the country’s history. It was, however, hardly the only one Sandya conceptualised and oversaw. Think of the two most innovative campaigns from this period: the child immunisation drive, and the polio eradication ads featuring Neela Wickramasinghe. Sponsored by UNICEF, both achieved their objectives, enabling Sri Lanka to achieve Universal Child Immunisation status and to eradicate polio completely by 1993. Both bore Sandya’s imprint, though they had to be promoted against much scepticism and opposition.
“I remember how the UNICEF team went completely quiet when [the idea of using Neela for an emotional plea over polio] was suggested. The nay-sayers had many excuses against this idea but I kept insisting that this would be a winner if we only could get Neela to agree… I recall meeting Neela at her home where she lived with her mother… Neela not only agreed promptly, but said she would appear for the campaign free of charge.”
In his book, Steven Kemper notes a rather curious paradox: while advertising executives tried to get closer to the local idiom through Sinhala and Tamil speaking audiences in the 1980s, their cultural conditioning made this gulf impossible to bridge. It was much later that agencies tried to go beyond media-centred communications, approaching rural audiences head-on. Kemper’s account ends in the late 1990s, around the time Sandya left conventional advertising, as she puts it, and entered Ogilvy Rural. A media-neutral agency, Ogilvy Rural, which later became Ogilvy Action, sought to do what advertising had failed to: reaching the broader masses. This was a gap agencies had not really addressed until then.
As usual Sandya found herself in the thick of things. Forming a network of young district coordinators, attempting and failing to woo Unilever with the new approach, and gradually striking gold with Dulux, Singer, Commercial Bank, Reckitt Benckiser, Maliban, and a host of other national and multinational brands, she came up with some of the most unforgettable campaigns from recent times, taking their messages to rural and suburban audiences. In this she had clear and definite ideas about what they should be aiming at.
“In my whole career I had never ever submitted or worked on a single piece of creative for the sake of an award… This was a concept I could never fathom and in fact I clashed many a time with my contemporaries in the industry on this topic. For me the first award comes from the consumer, when they accept and respond positively to our message. The second award is if the sales needle moves due to the campaign and of course the third and final one is the response I get from a contented client.”
In other words, winning awards was never a priority. Yet many of these campaigns did scoop up several prizes. More importantly, they gave us some of the most memorable one-liners ever to come out from the industry, including Maliban’s yahagunayen idiriyeta and Dialog’s gihin enakan, not to mention my personal favourite, Signal’s sinaha bo wewa.
It is to Sandya’s credit that she never took her commitment to these clients as an excuse to pollute, deface, and obstruct public spaces. She was particularly candid about what she calls “responsible communications.” Whether it was a Lifebuoy mobile shower in Kataragama or an Eveready makeshift lighthouse along “a dark, rural road”, she always tried to preserve. In doing so she emphasised the need for subtlety, and understatement.
“My eternal fight with the brand managers was not to ‘over-brand’ and clutter these sacred locations. I wanted it to be more a service with minimal commercialisation. When I couldn’t convince the Unilever activation team to be subtle, I would always complain to Amal and he would intervene, as he understood the importance of being mindful of the environment. This of course was my ongoing battle on many of the campaigns we worked on: to be as subliminal as possible with branding.”
Almost 30 years after joining TAL, Sandya Salgado left advertising in 2011. Working at the World Bank, then coming back home and setting up a travel agency, she has since refused to resign. At the end of the book she strikes a particularly optimistic note.
“Being forthright has been my trademark and ‘saying as it is’ was my thing. Age and maturity have made me bite my tongue more frequently and now, I smile, nod and shut up. This helps heaps. It’s now a conscious decision. My friends have said I am like Marmite: either I am loved or hated. How true!”
It’s difficult to read Not Just My Good Karma and not think of the years she spent in the field as the most rewarding anyone could have hoped for. This is an account of how life used to be in one of the more formative periods in the country’s and the industry’s history. Bringing together a galaxy of writers, designers, thinkers, and doers, ad agencies delivered on briefs, moved the sales needle, and contributed to the country’s pop culture. To paraphrase Steven Kemper, it was a time when companies advertised not because they had to, but because they wanted to. Sadly for us, this is a time that may never come back again.
