Bring on the empty horses

Just like that, Cartwheel has turned 20.

It doesn’t feel that long ago when we printed our first visiting cards. Just the word CARTWHEEL, upside down. And our names, without designations . Each of us chose a different coloured card. The little chuckle these gimmicks got us was all the icebreaker we needed.

It’s easy to look back at the last 20 years as a slo-mo montage with gentle dissolves of soft focus shots in warm lighting and a sentimental background score. But that would be like what a lot of advertising is. A bit disingenuous.

So, I’ll try to do something that our business, sadly, doesn’t have a great reputation for. Telling the truth. And the truth is we survived more than thrived. We’ve had bumper years, but had some terrible ones too. But I’ll take survival. It beats the alternative hollow.

The sensible thing for me to do today would be to showcase our finest work, drop names of great clients, mention the pitches we won against Goliaths, and mutter something about the awards we could have won if we really wanted to. But, alas, good sense doesn’t come easily to us.

If it did, we’d have better coffee mugs in the office. And a swankier office too. We’d PR the bejeesus out of every good piece of work we do. We’d take our clients out to dinner. We’d chase more business. But we’re pretty crap at all that.
So we just sit around in a huddle and talk about our clients’ problems. Firm in our belief that there is no problem too big for chai to solve. Other agencies have their proprietary tools. We have chai.

Chai helped us create an IPL based investment game for a mutual fund client. A comic featuring MSD for CSK. A fiction series for a bank. A sponsored motorbike trip around the country to demonstrate cashless-ness. And, of course, a fair bit of traditional stuff too.

But I am falling into the trap of converting a moment of reflection into a creds presentation. Let me recentre, like google maps does.

In the last 20 years, we had a ring seat view to the incredible shape shifting of our business. We witnessed advertising go north. All the way from Nariman Point to Goregaon and beyond. With pit stops at Worli, Parel, and horror of horrors, addresses that ended with ‘pada’.

We saw agencies metamorphose in reverse from butterflies to caterpillars. And some would say, deservedly so. We were caught with our hand in the cookie jar way too often. Charging for things we should never have. And we gave away what we are actually all about – for free. Ideas.

The ever quotable and watchable @rorysutherland said that advertising agencies are probably the only people in business who are paid to be creative. And that clients should hire agencies even if they don’t need advertising. Just to listen to their ideas. That’s our job. Ideas.

And yet, we restructured and fragmented and diversified and reimagined and rebooted and merged and amalgamated and pivoted and realigned ourselves out of our basic job. Those who could afford to enter awards scammed themselves into some fake sense of relevance.

We surrendered meekly to technology, trends, influencers, algorithms, and a new breed of client who didn’t know what on earth we were talking about. ‘Who watches TV? Who reads ads? What’s 30 seconds? ‘ they asked. And rightly so. And often, we had no answers.

Let me halt this downward spiral. After all, this is a moment of celebration for us. We’ve got a website full of stuff to be proud of.

Bring on the influencers, the in-house agencies, the content creators, the LinkedIn gurus, the algorithm hackers, the big tech evangelisers, the number crunchers, the meme makers, the neurological mappers. Hamare paas idea hai. +

AI, far from being our nemesis, could be our saviour. Because we know how to make it come up ‘The tongue of the mind’ as a tagline for a pen rather than ‘The refined narrator’. The former is by Cervantes, the latter by Chat GPT.

If I have successfully reversed the arc of my narrative and brought it to a place of hope, optimism, and adventure, I’ll wind up this self indulgent thread. All those who helped us get to where we are, a heartfelt thank you. Bring on the empty horses.

(From a thread posted by @ramkid on X)