The third consecutive big ticket event by the Advertising Club Bombay drew an astounding response. The annual Media Review held at the Taj Land’s End focused on ‘Unstoppable or Unsustainable’ with Sam Balsara, chairman and managing director, Madison; Shashi Sinha, CEO, Lodestar Universal; Vikram Sakhuja, COO, Group M South Asia, Lynn D’Souza who heads the Lintas Media Group and last but not least, Ravi Kiran, the dynamic and gregarious CEO Starcom MediaVest Group, all at hand to share their take on the matter.
Not only was each medium of advertising—print, television, radio and digital—immaculately represented through presentations, but everyone just had a good time. The media review event has been touted as the one platform for good advertising to not only be critically evaluated but studied to ensure a brighter future.
Lynn D’Souza :- Lynn’s presentation had everyone initially confused but soon they learned why she was an amazing storyteller as her presentation drew upon the Pugmarks pocket guide by the WWF; great resource encapsulating information about how to look at tiger pugmarks. Lynn drew conclusions or ‘possible tigers’ that helped the audience understand who and what made the biggest impact this year! The first set of pugmarks would have been a tiger but turned out to be a dog—the Hutch becomes Vodafone advertisement. The second set of pugmarks turned out to be a wolf—NDTV Media had created a sensation with their tie ups. The third was of a leopard—TRAI’s issuing of guidelines regarding audience measurement was leopard-like. IPL was the tiger; it had created a sensation knocking down previous strategies showing that TV short formats were entertaining, had global and universal appeal and were here to stay.
Vikram Sakhuja :- Vikram gave a very in-your-face presentation that hinged on facts and figures. His central aim was to establish the importance of ambient, outdoor media and cited Adidas’ campaign as an excellent example; he also talked about the importance of sponsorship. Engagement is the advertiser’s wand; it has to be used effectively and customers will not only buy a product but even endorse it. Airports and railways have really come on their own now and Bangalore airport’s giant suitcase is a successful indication. It’s all about using a cluttered environment in an intelligent manner and India would be seeing JC Deceaux, Clear, and Viacom coming to do the same. Size and quality of media matters; look around you and you’ll see this is true.
Shashi Sinha :- Shashi’s comprehensive presentation focused on emerging audiences, markets, segments, digitization and revenue. Under the umbrella of Print, Shashi went on to reassert Print’s power in the advertising industry. The audience is getting younger and print needs a younger, dynamic leadership to make it the giant it is poised to be. Youth are the future. Each state has its own print campaign; every language is getting the recognition and coverage it needs; Assamese, Oriya and Kannada for instance were not as popular as Hindi and English but no more is that the case. The market has a sectoral focus now; each sector gets its own specialist marketing tools. With emerging digitization, it’s not fair to say that print will be overpowered. In fact, they will work side by side to ensure growing revenue. Print has to embrace the digital revolution!
Ravi Kiran :- Ravi was more than welcome because he turned the audience’s attention to something that was unnecessarily being avoided—the power of digital. Citing Facebook as an example, he showed that the audience was now resorting to reading their ‘newspapers’ through RSS feeds, it was sending winks, beers and hugs for a dollar apiece online! We are on the brink of a digital revolution (already embraced in the West). It was clear everyone used a computer at least for checking email! Digital was unfairly called a ‘medium’ when in fact it was underlying every other medium; you have digital print, TV and radio! Digital is not only here to stay; it will command huge revenues very soon.
Sam Balsara :- The most experienced of the lot, Sam simply spoke about the ‘issues’ of the current scenario using the other speakers’ insights which he had carefully assessed for discussion. Sam’s many insights cleared the audience’s perceptions of a dominant field and instead focused their attention on the way we’re doing things, the audience we’re working to satisfy, the unfair attitude of calling a media communications specialist an agency and so on. Sam’s central goal was to ensure the audience benefited from the other speakers while addressing well known issues that seemed to have been put on the side.
All in all, the Media Review this year was a star studded finale of great personalities, not to mention professionals, as they kept everyone riveted with fascinating pieces of advertising centric information.