Wow, this is an awkward one.

It’s like asking your best friend how he is after he divorced your only sister. Kind of.

See, admen and madwomen across the world have one purpose – to out-do any other advertising they have ever seen. It’s highly competitive.

Every YouTube link that gets shared, every awesome-ultra-kickass Ads of the World ad, brings both joy and doom at the same time… conflicting emotions, “wow what a great ad”, mixed with “sweet lord, will I ever do something as good as that?”

See, it’s messy. Just like the divorce analogy.

The beauty and salvation of it all is that different agencies work on different clients, with naturally, different business objectives. So to draw a comparison really is a matter of opinion. And so, we all live happily ever after. That is, until an ad agency has to make an ad for themselves.

The world is watching, criticising and waiting to rip you apart. THAT is what you guys made for yourselves? Hell, should ad agencies even be advertising for themselves?

Well, yeah.

However.

The case for self-promotion is very different from client promotion and so are the means of doing it. Of course, there is the standard quarter page ad that says something very pointed about the agency. We are cool, or creative, or big; whatever the positioning is. Print ads are easy. But the problem is that they are not big. There is no grandness, depth or magic about them anymore. They could be one of a series of many, but they just cannot capture the essence of what a living, breathing beast like an ad agency is.

And this is where the tough part is. See, getting business in the market is a Catch 22. You have to be known for great things before great clients start approaching you and yet, you don’t get well known until you have great clients. And we have already bashed the humble print ad, so there is no easy way out. Not to say that it can’t be done – and that too beautifully.

In my humble and rather uninformed opinion, the greatest and grandest ad ever, is a man named David Ogilvy. What a guy, what a brand. He saw many years ago that the agency would need to develop an ad campaign to promote itself and so he made himself the brand. O&M is not just an agency, and honestly this article is not about their work. O&M is a brand, a culture, one that is highly sellable and believable. It is a true story of great things that were done, not just prescribed and sermonised about. It’s a picture of a legend who constantly talks to you. The cool Ogilvy quotes that are both simple and true, the sense of rightness, the insightful and applicable ideologies; all of them contribute to one thing, the Ogilvy brand, which at the same time is their legacy and their core equity. So if a new and apprehensive client with big budgets is wondering if O&M is the right agency to build and guard their brand, hey, just look at the reception in every O&M office the world over. Now that’s an ad.

Well done children.

But what if you are not with an agency that had the foresight to start building such a brand 70 years ago?

Then, there is only one other way to advertise yourself. The work, the people and nothing but.

At the end of the day, advertising is a business filled with promises that come with no guarantee. That is what our job is about; we make calculated promises and hope it works. You will never know for sure how well a communication strategy will do, until the campaign rolls out. But when the rubber does hit the tarmac, it also becomes an agency’s opportunity to capitalise on itself. It is solid evidence, proof, of a job well done.

So picture this, you are a midsized agency that has its highs and lows and it has been three weeks since you rolled out a very lovable, effective ad campaign filled with TV commercials, radio spots, Vine videos by the dozen, a witty Twitter feed and what not.

Now is the time to promote yourself. And it begins with how your people feel about themselves. First step, inculcate pride. Remind everyone who had anything to do with your success, that they are a team of excellent people who made it happen. Give them ownership. Get them talking. And get them sharing.

If your team is not reposting and sharing your last campaign on their wall, if they are not dragging their mums and aunts to see what they did, then you sir, have a problem.

Word of mouth is your single biggest tool. Your only weapon. Your best ad. And it begins from within the agency. Get. Your. People. Talking.

We live in a world where Twitter keeps us linked to anything the likes of Prince William or Rehman Malik have to say, and we can talk back to them. This is the age of instant gratification, short attention spans and spontaneous opinions.

Once you have your people taking pride in your work and sharing it in a personal capacity, get onto social media. I will assume that if you are considering advertising yourself, you already have a Facebook presence, website, Twitter account, blog and Instagram, Pinterest and SoundCloud, to let people know what you feel, sound, look and taste like. Well, use them.

But use them carefully. It is not about just posting bits and bobs from your recent campaign. Nope. That’s just a small part of it. What you really need to do is talk about the problem you solved, and the people who solved it (agency, client) and the people you solved it for (consumers). This will add context and relevance to your work. It makes it relatable, talkable, and people connect with it.

The brand manager feels like a star because the agency is inadvertently doing everything they can to get him a promotion. The team feels rewarded for having believed in your agency and taken pride in it to begin with. The consumers feel that here is an agency that is treating them like a living being and not just another housewife in a detergent commercial. Feel. Feels. Feelings. Make them feel.

The job of any advertisement is to make people ‘feel’ a certain way. It has to be insightful, warm, inclusive, honest, and at least appear genuine. These are the basics of any ad campaign. Why should they not apply to an agency’s own promotion?

Times may have changed; brands may have evolved as have the means to sell those brands. But the basics stay the same, every time and in every situation. We are people talking to people, that’s all.

Even the David Ogilvy example, what’s behind all that? A person, talking to people.

Only in our case, it’s a matter of achieving visibility.

Seth sahee bolta hai… dikhayga to bikayga. Jangal mein morr nacha, kiss ne dekha?

MM has worked as an advertising creative consultant for the last 15 years.