What do most people do when on a weekday holiday? Maybe I should say - what do non-advertising people do when they’re on a day off because we all know what advertising people do - and I won’t talk about that as this is a family magazine!
Anyway - every time there’s a holiday, most people go out with friends, family or friends and family.
They party or go out for dinner the night before as they can get up a bit later the next morning, they go to the movies, go out for lunch, take the kids to the zoo, go to the mall, go to the park, or to the seaside, or the beach or to the shops or have friends come home. If it’s a long weekend, they may go away to stay with family and friends - either in a hotel or guest house or whatever.
College students tank up their bikes and get away. Work colleagues organise themselves for a conference or seminar or whatever.
Quite simply - what they do is spend money doing all the above. And when they spend money across all these consumer opportunities and products and services it moves goods off the shelves and keeps the wheels of the economy going at all levels of the socio economic strata.
Festivals are a perfect example — Holi, Diwali, Puja, Pongal, Christmas and Easter, all holidays. Holidays are what we need more of, to encourage consumers to spend money.
So when the Indian cricket team wins a world cup we should declare a holiday to celebrate and give a shot in the arm to the economy.
Take a leaf out of the Chinese - they have a Chinese new year holiday for a month and the whole country gets moving - shops sell, people travel, and the economic activity gets a real boost in that month.
More holidays, please. It’s good for business. But who’s listening ?
And, of course, in the advertising industry in our country, most people work all the hours God made anyway so it won’t make a darned bit of difference to ad men and women.
Clients will still ask for stuff over the weekend and meetings on Saturday and even Sundays sometimes!
I’ve never been able to understand why agency heads are unable to say “we don’t work weekends and holidays”. I’m sure clients will appreciate hearing that. They will appreciate that their creative input can only be at its sharpest if the people working on the business are fully charged and are in tune with what’s going on in the marketplace, which will never happen if the guys are in the office all day and all night, 24 x 7.
Some of the best creative work I believe comes from the UK and try finding a creative person at the weekend - at work. You wouldn’t even dare suggest it to them to come in at the weekend to work on an ad.
That’s another reason why we need more holidays. So we get time off to relax and think and to sharpen our skills and better the end product.
The better the advertising - the more advertising will sell. The more you sell - the more you’ll buy and that’s good for business.
(Peter Mukerjea enjoys his holidays when he’s off duty as chief strategy officer, INX Media)
