Education
Bernard Paes is an Entrepreneur and Creative Director. In his many years living in Dubai, he was managing his own advertising company. We discuss how authentic advertising is. How much "makeup" a fizzy drink advert needs in order to sell. There is a certain amount of makeup to beautify yourself in front of people or to beautify a product in front of people. https://youtu.be/kTsMUTxvPcs Watch the full conversation between storytellers Bernard Paes and Albert Bonet. He compares marketing to dress codes, that we use to be appropriate, to fit in a certain environment. We're used to that level of appearance, we're expecting it, and so a good marketer as to present their product accordingly. You want the outside world to understand you because in advertising there's a phrase "you've got two seconds to catch your consumer". If you don't present it in the way that the consumer is already accustomed to, then you straight away have a disadvantage. We talk about principles, and how he left the advertising industry because of the business practices of big companies, where marketing managers are not commited to the company. I am committed to a brand for the rest of my life. Like for example I will never drink Pepsi. Never. Because I've handled CocaCola for 10 years in the advertising agency. Even today although I'm not an advertising man I don't drink Pepsi, I don't drink any other cola. READ THE FULL TRANSCRIPT: ALBERT: Here I am in Paris, still. I'm sitting here with Bernard Paes, who is an entrepreneur and creative director. Hi Bernard.BERNARD: Hi, how are you?ALBERT: Thank you for accepting this and being so willing.BERNARD: It's my pleasure.ALBERT: You've been telling me that you're a citizen of the world.BERNARD: I've been everywhere. But yeah, I'm I'm an Indian born in Kuwait, who lived most of my life in Dubai. I had a couple of businesses in Dubai, and now I'm a Portuguese citizen living in France. So yeah, I consider myself a citizen of the world. I've travelled enough, so yeah.ALBERT: And you've been working for most of your life in creative direction, in advertising, you have your own advertising company. Now you work on packaging for perfumes.BERNARD: Yes, luxury perfume packaging.ALBERT: And we were discussing earlier about marketing, because you know that my thing is is authenticity. Authentic Storytelling. And we were just discussing how from my point of view, marketing is is far away from authenticity because it kind of pretends there's something there that people want to buy and is that something that they it's pretended that they feel attracted to. What are your views on this?BERNARD: There are two sides to it. The way the way I look at it is I give equal bias to both, because I've seen and done both sides of it. You try and oversell in marketing yes but you also try and oversell yourself sometimes, so there is a certain amount of makeup as you would say to beautify yourself in front of people or to beautify a product in front of people. Because the truth is if I did for example a photograph of a simple can of soft drink I would have to retouch that can to make it presentable. And that's exactly what advertising is. It would over glorify our product just to make it presentable. You could interpret it in two ways: they're doing especially to make it look better than it really is or they're making a presentation of their product. I find the same thing in the human self and also in marketing.ALBERT: Isn't one of the conditions of the human mind that we want to look good? And isn't ugliness somehow raw and attractive?Just because it's raw because it doesn't have any makeup on? It's like a child that doesn't pretend to be anything, they just are. Like animals, you're a big animal lover, right?BERNARD: I'm a creature lover. I love any of God's creatures.ALBERT: Humans are the only ones that overthink how they look and they want to look good. Animals don't care about that and that beautiful.