The Hindu Business Line : ‘Ad industry needs a CEO’

Jagdip Bakshi, Chairman, GoaFest 2008, is a happy man. The festival this year saw many improvements on various fronts, an important one being the “rocking” relationship with Ad Club Mumbai and a pact to consolidate it further. In this piece, Bakshi details the highlights of this year’s experience.

Improvements at GoaFest in 2008

This year we were much better organised. One of the key new things we did right was hiring a software company to handle the registration.

Equally or more importantly, it helped us to monitor which delegates attended which seminar and so on. This is very accurate feedback for next year.

Secondly, we built the exhibition halls much better. We showed only short-listed and final list entries.

We warned participating companies in advance that we’d require specific formats and sizes. to send the final That saved us a lot of time.

The festival cost approximately Rs 7 crore this year. It was funded through a combination of sponsorship and delegate fees.

Right from inception GoaFest has been about encouraging the under-30s to come and attend GoaFest, see the work of the previous year, rub shoulders and interact with the great gurus of the industry.

This has been done better year on year. We had nearly 900 under-30s this year at GoaFest. This is a key achievement and we are going to encourage it further. In the media space, in conversations on blogs, we’ve had many seniors say they never had something like this when they started work.

That sponsors see increasing value in GoaFest is clear, as one of our prime sponsors this year (a leading entertainment channel) has approached us for a formal three-year tie-up.

Sponsors who see value in GoaFest

Everybody who believes this is an industry with the kind of creative talent and mind power which could very much became a power for the world to reckon with, like the software industry did. It’s just a matter of getting the structure right.

So far it has been media companies – IBF and INS members – but it is becoming a more diversified group. The country head of Microsoft approached me and said, can we sign for 10 years? (They are a part of Cannes the same way).

Way forward for advertising

I truly believe that there should be a CEO for the industry whose singular job is to promote the interest of the industry – an equivalent of Kiran Karnik. That is what Nasscom did and it certainly got it right. This will be an AAAI committee decision. I have proposed it, and the intent is there already there.

On entries, scam ads, awards

We are going to have a form that the clients must sign. It will ask for information they cannot ignore, like the ad’s release date, where it was released, who authorised it … Ad Club Bombay and Advertising Agencies’ Association of India are going to sit together and work out what the output of the result is going to be, so that it is not subject to interpretation. This is a priority.

On TIES with Ad Club Mumbai

I think the relationship was rocking! We took the best of both sides and it was a fantastic experience. One of the things we are working on currently is signing an MoU with the Ad Club to do Abby at GoaFest together for five years, essentially leveraging our strengths, both bodies doing what they are best at doing.