Financial Times

Advertising campaigns with social responsibility
By Dinushika Dissanayake
A young man, well dressed and in a luxury car, drives by an elderly man and his daughter on a lonely road. He stops the car and reverses close to them. The old man peers at him suspiciously and protectively pushes back his daughter. The man gets down and greets his old teacher with much gratitude. The old man breaks into a smile of recognition. The traditional Sri Lankan value of respect for one’s teachers is depicted in a simple advertisement.

The advertisement was a part of the advertising campaign launched by Maliban biscuits, called “Yahagunayen Idiriyata”. The series of advertisements signalled a new era of advertising in Sri Lanka where a simple television advertisement was evolved into something far more socially conscious and responsible.

Sandya Salgado, Chief Executive Officer of Ogilvy Outreach, was the brainchild behind this novel idea of combining social responsibility with commercial advertising. “As advertisers we have a responsibility to society,” said Salgado, while adding that this does not mean that advertising should be entirely for not-for-profit objectives. Having won 10 awards at the recently concluded SLIM awards, Ogilvy Outreach has been responsible for some revolutionary and yet deceptively simple advertising campaigns in the past few years.

“We are making money and it is a commercial venture but we believe in doing something more than just selling the product,” she said. According to Salgado the marketing concept of gaining a ‘mind share’ in the consumer has been evolved by Ogilvy to gaining a ‘heart share’ in the consumer.

Ogilvy Outreach in its short six year history has come a long way in inculcating its theory into the mindset of their large corporate clients. “Consumers have so many choices to make, it all depends on how to talk to them not only what you talk about,” said Salgado. According to her, advertising is such a powerful communication tool it could make or break a society’s values and culture.

“People really changed the way they thought of advertising after the Maliban biscuit series of advertisements,” said Salgado. Her idea was to bring back the Sri Lankan values which she says are fast becoming obsolete among the modern youth. She says that the campaign which was socially conscious and carried a clear message had also brought a large number of sales to the company, their sales targets for the period being met and surpassed.

ccording to her, the dilemma of serving society while at the same time increasing your clients’ commercial objectives was thus satisfied concurrently. However, she also said that most advertisers in Sri Lanka today do not ‘know’ the consumer. “I feel that we really underestimate the consumers’ ability to grasp the good and the bad in a particular advertisement,” she said. Salgado said that at Ogilvy they try as much as possible to change the way the consumers think, and that they themselves truly believe in the product they are advertising.

“The bottom line is that what we do should be in-line with our conscience,” she said. In keeping with this line of thought, Salgado as a policy does not undertake advertisements on tobacco, alcohol, political parties and religious groups.

Within Ogilvy itself, Salgado has created a ‘Work hard, Play hard’ culture, where each employee is carefully chosen for their hard working and passionate approach to the job. She has inculcated an environment where each employee is treated equally and all are equally responsible for a given project. “We have minimal departmentalisation and there is a lot of cross-department project work,” she said.

Salgado, apart from successfully having initiated a change in the advertising culture in Sri Lanka, has also initiated change in the image carried by advertising firms as well. “Most advertising firms have a glamorous and urban image, but I decided to give the students from rural areas a chance,” she said, adding that such employees have as many or more creative initiatives as their rivals from the city.

Demonstrating her socially responsible agenda in all dealings, most of her staff are graduates from local universities and the ability to work in the English language is not a criterion. She also employs approximately 2,000 to 3,000 unemployed youth across the island in her advertising campaigns.

“These people know what makes the masses ‘tick’,” said Salgado attributing the vastly successful Dialog Telekom’s “Gihing ennang dialog” campaign to her creative employees. According to her, the catchy phrase appeals to the masses and cuts across all social strata’s which was the exact image that Dialog wanted to create.

Asked what inspires her to take up this novel concept of advertising coupled with social consciousness, Salgado said that for her, advertising was not a job but a way of life. “I was always haunted by the dilemma of glamorising a brand for certain up-market consumers, while knowing at the back of my mind that there were children who could not afford it,” she said. At Ogilvy she was able to combine the two objectives and create a brand new method of getting to the ‘heart’ of the consumer and not just the mind.

According to her, the Signal “Sinaha boho”campaign which collected smiles from Sri Lankan’s across the island, appealed to the people and really targeted the ‘heart’ of the consumer. The campaign also put Sri Lanka into the Guinness book of records, boosted the company’s sales, and won Ogilvy a Gold medal at the SLIM awards 2005.

The traditionally acclaimed Sri Lankan smile was the core of the campaign, and according to Salgado, it demonstrates that advertising is sometimes a depiction of the simplest things in life which touches the consumer heart.

Salgado says that satisfaction in her work comes when a consumer thanks her personally for a campaign. She describes a man who thanked her with tears in his eyes for having built wells in his village. His was a border village and to him the campaign by Sunlight soap to build wells was a God send. For Salgado, his experience was proof of a job well done.

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