How many lives did you save again?

I have a friend who works in the advertising industry in Mumbai, India.

What I get to hear every time I talk to this friend is that the client has asked for some last minute changes to the ad campaign or to the material or the artwork or some such thing. It is not uncommon in the ad industry to spend late hours on the job. In fact, it is extremely rare for someone in the ad industry to work like normal human beings.

Here is the problem I have with the frenzy.

What happens if these people just slow down a bit and live like normal people? What happens if the ad comes out a day later than it was supposed to? I know that in certain cases, the timing of the ad is of paramount importance, but that has to be the exception rather than the rule, right?

Consider the case of the financial services industry or the telecom industry. Their requirements are not advert based, but technology based these days to support the growing number of subscribers to their service.

If a system supporting their business fails, millions of people are impacted. In case of the financial services industry, it could mean that a lot of people cannot trade on the stock exchange or a lot of people cannot get access to their salaries. In the telecom space, a lot of people may not be communicable or entire organizations may not be able to talk to one another. In the healthcare industry, the normal flow of patients may be severely impacted if they have a problem with their system.

So in all these critical circumstances, there is, and rightly so, frantic activity to resolve the problem. But when things are going well, people don't always work late.

Coming back to the ad world, almost every day is a late night at the office. And a lot of people take pride in this.

But isn't advertising an implied form of generating revenue? The entire concept of advertising is to get as many eyeballs to see the product the ad is trying to hawk. Just because I see an ad does not mean that I will buy that product. Of course, I will be a little bit influenced in the direction of the product after seeing the ad, but it definitely does not make up my mind.

So when you consider the amount of money spent on advertising campaigns, billboards, multi-million-rupee endorsement contracts with celebrities, all it amounts to is the indirect implication of increased revenue.

I know that the ad industry is extremely crucial to business and that it hugely helps businesses make a lot more money than what they would have made without advertising, but the frenzy is something I cannot understand.

You cannot have chaos all the time. That speaks of a disorganized industry. Where personal lives are not cared about. Where people invest most of their time on working for someone else who does not give two shakes of a rat's ass about your life.

Unless you are someone like Bharat Dabholkar, Allyque Padamsee, Prasoon Joshi, Balki or Piyush Pandey (all of who have worked on some really brilliant campaigns), I wonder if you wake up the next day and feel a sense of achievement in the previous day's work.

Was the frenetic activity worth it? Was spending time away from family and friends, and more importantly, from yourself worth the effort you put it?

Does the ad industry consider these things? As an outsider, I may have the wrong idea, but I need someone to help correct it.