Sixty days into the new year. And the Indian advertising industry has already witnessed a lot of action. And a few surprises too. The highpoint, of course, being the brouhaha over the annual industry festival Goafest and the subsequent announcement that things are back on track. It has been announced that Goafest 2011 will be a five-day event this year, from April 5-9 at Zuri White Sands in South Goa (and not Cavelossim Beach). The judging process for Creative and Media Abbys has also gone for an overhaul with two rounds of judging held for a few key categories. The first round of judging will be held in Mumbai and the second in Goa, closer to the awards night. So hopefully, leaking of the awards results (which happened during the last two Creative Abbys) will be a thing of the past. And perhaps scam ads too, but we will talk of that later.
The year also started with a high-decibel mobile number portability (MNP) campaign war among the many telecom companies. And this is just the beginning, we hear. This war is expected to get bigger as all parties bring on more ammunition, aka campaigns. At the same time, another storm is brewing in the same category, this time over the advent of 3G. Most telecom companies have already launched their campaigns and we expect to see a lot more action on that front too.
Two months into the new year, BrandWagon brings you the lowdown on what advertising and media veterans believe will happen in 2011. And that is not all, as we also bring you their wish-list?all that they would like to see happen or, perhaps, change in the industry, this year.
Our panel comprises Leo Burnett’s Arvind Sharma, RK Swamy BBDO’s Srnivasan K Swamy, BBH India’s Subhash Kamath, Dentsu India’s Rajesh Aggarwal, Starcom MediaVest Group’s CVL Srinivas and Mediacom’s Debraj Tripathy.
There is a unanimous agreement on the growth of digital advertising this year, which will lead to focused target segmentation. The clients will up their digital spends and they will also accept the fact that social media is not a niche phenomenon any longer, says our panel.
While each of them expect to see more digital work, the professionals we spoke to, want to see as little of scam ads as possible. Created exclusively for awards and not for consumers, these have been detrimental to the industry. Less or no scam ads is the one thing that they expect to happen in 2011. We hope for the same too.
Another common area of concern for all is the inability to attract and retain the best of talent. There should be more organized efforts from industry organizations to attract more talent into the industry?especially in creative, they believe, and there should be more investment, induction, training and retention of fresh and bright talent into the industry, feel the experts.
So read on to know what our panelists hope to see this year.