How do you make cables sexy? That was the question Dubai-based ad agency Intermarkets asked itself when it received a brief from Ducab – a local cabling company – last year. The advertising agency decided to create a cable hero, and Wireman was born.

Wireman might not be much of a hotty, but he’s managed to make a – let’s admit it – boring subject kind of fun. And profitable: Ducab saw a significant increase in business after the “Life moves with Ducab” campaign launched in September 2008.

Rather than keep the campaign very corporate, Intermarkets decided to make it human. “It’s a very industrial product, to be very honest,” says Siddhartha Banerjee, Intermarkets’ senior copywriter. “If you asked any consumers, people who are not associated with the company, they’ll not know about Ducab because the product is behind the walls, underneath the floors, above the ceilings. So you cannot feel it or see it, and you don’t need to, actually.

“So when the client came with the brief to launch a corporate campaign, we thought, ‘OK, what can we do?’” Banerjee says. “We suddenly realized, why not make this campaign a really mass market product, even if people are not going to use it like a mass market product?”

Ducab had recently done some market research, and the team at Intermarkets chose a statement by a respondent in that survey as the starting point for the campaign. The statement read, “Ducab is like air in our life, without which we would perish.” Dramatic and cheesy? Yes. But useful, too.

With that statement in mind, Banerjee and his art director partner, Prem Rajan, started imagining life without cables. “Everything would come to a standstill without Ducab,” says Banerjee. And so the copy, “Life moves with Ducab,” was born. Then they started sketching little men made out of cables digging on a construction site, doing business on a street corner, and working at a port. Think stick figures made out of wire.

MODEL CLIENTS. It was an unusual idea, and Banerjee and Rajan knew they had to run it by the folks at Ducab before they could go ahead and create the intricate models for presentation. They dummied up Wireman on Photoshop, and the client loved the idea. Then it took about three weeks to create the different physical models, and a three-day photo shoot to complete the campaign.

“Those are actual Ducab cables,” says Banerjee. “The wires are very thin, and the lighting had to be very sharp so the detailing could come out really well. We experimented by shooting almost all possible angles. After the shoot, the art direction was very important, to add details and position the models properly. It was a team effort, from the creative side to servicing to everyone. Everybody participated, so it turned out to be a fantastic campaign.”

The “Life moves with Ducab” campaign was an integrated one, with Wireman spanning diaries, calendars, tissue boxes, mupies, print and online. In total, about 20 items were spun off, and the reaction to what Banerjee calls an “emotional” campaign was positive. “It is a B2B campaign, absolutely, but there is life included. If you read the copy, it’s very emotional. I thought it would be unjust to the campaign if I talked about the cables, but you don’t require this, because it’s a very fun campaign. Even if you’re not buying the product, its presence will be felt. So I think it’s successful in that sense. The client’s reaction was fabulous; he was so thrilled, he approved the campaign without any changes – almost – which is very, very rare.”

Intermarkets initially had another option for the Ducab corporate campaign. It was a fully typographic one that would have likened Ducab to the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the planet we live on. Fortunately, both the client and agency loved Wireman instead.

It seems they weren’t the only ones; the campaign has helped see Ducab voted a Superbrand for 2009. The company will appear in the fifth edition of Superbrands UAE, an annual book that pays tribute to the strongest brands in the country.

CAREER CHOICES. Banerjee joined Intermarkets as senior copywriter in December 2006 after working in a number of agencies across the Indian subcontinent and beyond.

Prior to college, he thought he’d end up working in hotel management, fashion design, or cookery. While he says they are all noble jobs, Banerjee is thankful they didn’t materialize, and he signed up for an advertising program instead. Although he expected to go into the accounts side of the business, his professors asked him whether he’d be interested in studying copywriting or art design instead.

“I thought there would be too much to learn in art direction, and that copywriting would be the easy way out,” he says. (He is quick to add that he’s since discovered this isn’t true at all.) “So I majored in copywriting.” And that was the start of a colorful career path for Banerjee, who got his first job at Twentieth Century, a small agency in Calcutta. From there he freelanced, joined another agency, then finally decided to leave his hometown.

“I felt like something was missing, and I wanted to do something different,” says Banerjee. “So one fine day I left for Mumbai with very little money and no friends. From the day I reached Mumbai, my grooming started – not only to be a better ad person, but to be a complete human being. I showed my portfolio to some big names, but they told me I wouldn’t get a job showing this portfolio, so they told me to create a new, fresh one. I was counting every penny at the time so I thought, ‘Ok, I’ll sketch my portfolio.’ I sketched the entire portfolio, wrote scripts, and started visiting agencies. Big names started liking me and giving me references. That way I got a job with Marching Ants. It was a small agency but a quality job.”

FROM GREY TO GOLD. Grey Worldwide came knocking at Banerjee’s door not long after, and they eventually moved him to their office in Dhaka, Bangladesh. “Going to Bangladesh was the beginning of my golden era,” he says. “I worked with guys like Sandip Rakhit, who is now chief operating officer of Grey Vietnam, and Ayan Chakraborty, who is now associate vice-president of Saatchi & Saatchi Mumbai. That’s the reason why I’ve become so strategically sound, because I learned strategy from these guys.”

A stint at Grey Sri Lanka was followed by an offer from Sabco Art in Muscat, a Publicis Graphics affiliate. An almost-move to Y&R in Jordan was thwarted by the outbreak of the July 2006 war in Lebanon, and that’s how Banerjee ended up in Dubai at Intermarkets.

“Thankfully, wherever I work, I learn from every individual, and you don’t realize these things until you leave that place; you realize what you’ve learned and what things you’ve kept,” he says. “I believe that even if you work in London or New York, you’ll find certain people or brands frustrating, as if you’ve been cornered. It can happen anywhere in the world. But the challenge as a creative person is how you’ll take up that challenge, and how you foresee the future.”