When you're interviewing someone who knows so much about the advertising and marketing industry, it's easy to go off-topic. Here are some great insights from our interview with Balki that we didn't expect, but were glad to get

On starting out in advertising:
I never knew the existence of a thing called advertising, or that there was a career to be made out of advertising. I always wanted to be a filmmaker. When I saw the Mudra ad asking for copywriters, I thought it was an ad from Ramesh Sippy! That logo used to come at the end of every episode of Buniyaad. I thought Sippy's calling, so I applied. Nagananda Kumar, who later joined Lowe in HR, met me and asked, "Why do you want to join advertising?" I said I didn't want to, and had no interest in it. He said, "You seem like a guy who, once the cobwebs in his brain are cleared, can be somebody." I said, "That's fine, but when do I meet Ramesh Sippy?"

He asked me to stay with Mudra for six months. We were the first six guinea pigs for MICA. They had no vision of MICA at that time; Naga was the guy who believed that advertising people can be trained. It was an experimental training programme in Ahmedabad, for six months. People who had no link with advertising--an MBA, a journalist, a computer engineer [Balki], and a few others--were put together. Once that was actually successful, they said, "Why can't there be an institute called MICA?"

On his continued interest in the industry:
[You're interested] as long as you have ideas and stories to tell. Stories need a theme. The themes happen to be brands. So you have a brand whose idea is so-and-so, or you think of an idea, say the brand's idea can be so-and-so, so why don't we tell a story about that. Feature films, advertising, everything is about storytelling of some kind or the other. There's a problem and you need a story to solve the problem. That's what it boils down to. I like the business of problem-solving with stories.

Everyday there's a new problem. I ask a lot of people who want to get into marketing: Do you want to be the marketing manager of one company, or the marketing manager of 25 companies? In advertising, that's the luxury you get.

On making an ad for the digital medium:
It is different in the way you conceptualise the story. The way you get them to watch that video, the path, is slightly different. There are a few more games you need to play to get them there. But the communication is the idea expressed in that particular form. That can never change and never will change.

Online's a huge medium, with a huge amount of possibilities. Today a lot of online is being defined as one creative rendition of a mass-media idea that is being tailored for some online activity. But it's not like that. Online is a very serious medium. But the biggest problem of online is the effectiveness of online.

On new media:
I don't believe in new media or old media. Advertising is a business of ideas. Mediums keep changing---like it changed from print to television, it's a lot more digital, mobile, ambient today. But it all depends on the idea. Media is just the expression of the idea in different forms.

People keep talking about digital and the predominant media in digital is still video. But how do you use video? Either it's a video with a clear-cut strategy to reach people, or something that you can't afford to do on television, or it's far more carefully-targeted. So, digital as a medium, to me, is a great way to experiment with a lot more things that you can't afford to do on television.

On mobile as a medium:
Mobile is slightly different. Mobile is a lot more strategic than creative. The biggest advantage of a mobile is to track a consumer based on his location, which is a great advantage. You can target in a far better way, give him relevant messages while he's in that frame of mind. That's where I think mobile plays a huge role. It's very difficult to communicate the traditional way on a mobile, much as people say that mobile's going to replace television and your computer. It's not in the traditional ideas business.

On clients and new mediums:
Every client is open to everything. It depends on which is the most relevant medium. Everybody's got a limited amount of money. Which is the combination that will get you the most bang for your buck? There are no fads involved. What do you want to do? That's what's most important. It's not the fad of the medium that's going to dictate what's right or wrong.

On Indian brands and the digital space:
Indian brands can easily do it; it's just the quality of stuff that you do on a particular medium. People say, we don't have PC penetration or enough connections. All rubbish. You have to create the buzz. Even if just two people have it [today], two billion people will have it tomorrow. That's the power of the online medium. It's not the medium that's stopping it, but creativity.

-- Tyrel Rodricks