PROFILE: Creative planner inspired by Mandarin

Planners have often been called 'the left side of a creative brain', although Saurabh Sharma’s supposedly-logical brain reverberates with echoes from influences as disparate as disgraced Daewoo chief Kim Woo-choong’s book heavily laden with corporate braggadocio; and 2010 Mandarin short film Old Boys elegizing lost youthful dreams of Michael Jackson impersonations.

Many planners are introverted and don’t often share what they visualise, says the planning partner at Ogilvy & Mather Beijing. This could be because they prefer to keep their opinions from ‘unsmart’ people, or are fearful of imposing their views when confronted by creatives. 

To Sharma, however, confrontations can be a hotbed for creativity. Planners not only think, but also create, he says. “A planner is just a creative guy who cannot draw.”

Sharma emphasises that planning is a whole lot more creative than most give it credit for. “In fact, everyone should be creative, not just people with the word in their job titles. Because the world has a dumbing effect on all of us, keeping brain-alive, staying curious and cerebrally unsatiated is a daily challenge.”

Sharma is a four-time winner of WPP’s Atticus award for original thinking in marketing services. “My sense of identity is from creation,” he says. “If I don’t create something new for 48 hours, I feel uncomfortable and think I’m just pumping blood and wasting life. To solve difficult problems in advertising, you need to create and not just use workaround solutions.” 

His passions include futurology; India-China parallels and contrasts; “intimacies we develop with technology”; and language. Sharma says his knowledge of Chinese helps him become a better “creative-trigger artist”.

The Indian expat living in Beijing has just published Turbo Chinese, a book that uses visual processing and spatial reasoning to learn Chinese characters. 

Language is the involuntary reflex of a society, and English can be quite arbitrary, he says. This arbitrariness is invisible to native speakers as the language is second nature to them. “But when we learn a new language as adults, we tend to reason more, compare more and discover its quirks.” 

In this discovery lies insights into the culture and beliefs in China, he says. “Five years back, when I first set out to learn Chinese, I had a very simple goal: to be able to talk to my Chinese friends, colleagues and clients and be able to read some characters to understand the place I was in a little better. However, five years later, knowledge of the language is now a potent tool that helps me do my job better,” he explains. 

Spontaneity in Western culture causes people to think on their feet and give quick feedback, but in Chinese culture, people take in things and react later, says Sharma. “Using their language speeds up the process. When I brief our creative teams, the Chinese words and phrases I use act as hooks and head-starts to discussions, and come in very handy to understand sentiment,” he says. 

When gathering consumer research for local sports brand 361 Degrees, Sharma found himself much more immersed. “Language helps me get under the skin of my interviewees faster, with fewer errors when messages have to be translated,” he says.

The average foreigner may also not notice the subtle difference in China’s sports scene, he elaborates. The country has a strong Olympic culture made up of mainly spectators and punters, but sport has no weight in mass culture and is not commonplace, like food or tea.

“Being bilingual puts you at the top of the world,” says Sharma. “Five years ago, I was at the bridge of a ship; now I can go down to the boiler room and see how the ship is being propelled.”

Mickey Chak, chief planning officer at Ogilvy, admires Sharma’s ability to drive inspiration. “The basic job of planners is to see a logical flow of argument that aids creative strategy. But to make people ‘buy’ your idea, you need that extra magic. Saur-abh inspires even the creatives. Because of him, we now expect other planners to be the firestarters of creativity.”