My Rediffusion Days…

Ambi Parameswaran harks back to the time in the late 1970s when he interned at Rediffusion and then joined the agency as a management trainee, in possibly the first ever management training programme in the Indian ad world

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It was April 1978 and I was at IIM Calcutta, looking for a suitable summer internship. I was keen on an internship that was Calcutta-based and the choice was rather limited. I stumbled upon an innocuous note in the placement notice board saying that a small agency headquartered in Bombay was looking for a summer intern to work out of their Calcutta office. I applied and that was the first time I met the co-founder of Rediffusion Advertising, Ajit Balakrishnan and Subhas Chakravarty, branch director of Rediffusion Calcutta. It turned out that both were alumni of IIM-C and were wondering if fresh IIM graduates could be inducted into their small company. I think the fact that both of them were IIM-C alumni kind of clinched the deal. I agreed to do my internship at Rediffusion Calcutta on a then esoteric topic of ‘Simulation Model for Media Planning’.

As a summer intern, I was given the freedom to work from campus or come to the office at Camac Street, if my memory serves me right. It was a research project that involved studying numerous papers and these were obviously to be found in the IIM-C library. But I was welcome to visit the office every day, if need be. I remember seeing the layouts for some of the legendary campaigns that were being hatched by the agency (remember ‘Whenever You See Colour Think Of us’) campaigns that were being presented to Calcutta-based clients such as Jenson & Nicholson, Eveready and New Delhi Magazine from the ABP Group.

Rediffusion believed in centralizing its key resource, the creative talent. The branch offices did not have any creative talent and all campaigns were created in Mumbai and shipped to the various outposts. (If you think that is odd, you should study how Leo Burnett for many decades had only one office in the US, in Chicago, while all their competitors had multiple offices scattered through the US).