"Dhoondte Reh Jaaoge" - Everyone Loved It

Well "Dhoondte Reh Jaaoge" was a Markit event which kind of created history for the number of participants it attracted. After a dismal show in "ADD2AD" we had never expected this level of participation(29 teams, more than 100 students). It was fun conceptualizing and conducting this event.

The idea was brilliant and the execution impeccable. Basically it was a "Brand-Hunt" where in participating team were given a series of clues to identify a certain number of brands to reach their prize money or shall I say "Treasure". We used the whole Loyola campus as the search ground. The LIBA campus looked so lively and energetic with participants running from pillar to post to crack the clues. The tremendous success of this event helped me gaining confidence in my organizational and leadership skills.

Above all this success was a result of brilliant mix of team work, enthusiasm and passion. The posters for this event are included at the top of this post and I personally rate them as the most creative poster Markit club has ever come up with.

Regards,

Ravi.

Markit - The Marketing Club of LIBA (Part II)

My association with Markit in 2nd year at LIBA demanded not only creativity but some good leadership skills. Continuing the tradition we (2nd year Markit reps) had to bring in fresh minds from 1st year in the club. We came up with this event called "Expression4Impression" where in we asked the 1st year students to come up with a tagline for the Markit logo that is the thumb impression. We got tremendous response for the event and the winners for the same was declared in the packed auditorium at the end of an entertaining quiz. Then we took an interest check of the people who were interested in joining the club and to our surprise we got more than 40 names.

Now the next step for us was to decide upon 8-10 people out of those interested to be the part of core Markit team. And we decided to let all the interested students from 1st year conduct this event called "ADD2AD" which was all about improving on certain TVCs which were not communicating their message effectively. We thought that by giving juniors a chance to conduct this event will automatically bring the passionate people to the fore. But sometimes things doesn't go the way you want and despite extending the deadline for the event twice and many pleadings( read 2 in "ADD2AD" in Hind to get a feel of it :))we din't get a single entry from 1st year. I really don't know what went wrong may be my leadership was flawed. Anyways we went ahead and screened some 6 odd entries from 2nd year but this event left me demoralized.

(The poster for this event is included at the top of this post)

Insight'09 - It Just Got Bigger

When I was asked to come up with some themes for this year's Insight, LIBA's very own two-day National Management Symposium, the very first theme I suggested was "Adversetising" (Advertising in Adversities or economic slowdown to be specific).But sadly nobody bought this idea as they thought we can not have conference only on advertising for two days continuous. Finally, the theme chosen was "Riding the New Wave: Emergence of the New Business Models". And today after attending the first day of Insight '09 @Hotel Green Park(in Pic.), Chennai, I have no remorse whatsoever that the later was chosen as the theme because it turned out to be an ad-feast in true sense.

We had Mr. C.K Ranganathan, Chairman and MD, CavinKare Pvt. Ltd. inaugurating the conference and delivering a short speech followed by the key-note address by Mr. Ravi Santhanam, MD, Hindustan Motors. Until his presentation I had never imagined that Beatles had a unique business model to sell their vinyl records and so has Prince and U2. It was quite a learning experience listening to him about business models followed by some prominent book authors and publishers, automobile companies, software companies etc.

The first session of the day was on "Retail" industry and we had Mr. Bijou Kurien, President and Chief Executive, Lifestyle-Reliance Retail, as the speaker for the session. The second session had four distinguished speakers for the topic "Digital Strategy- Internet, Mobile and SMM" and this was the session where we got to see some really creative pieces of advertising. The first to speak among the lot was Mr. Satya Prabhakar, CEO, Sulekha.com, and during the course of his presentation he showed us two award winning ads for his firm. Trust me those two were creative ads which you come across rarely. You can see the ads @

1. ad-1

2. ad-2 .

The second speaker for the session was Mr. Rohit Mull, Head-Marketing, HDFC Bank. His presentation was laced with humor and at one point while explaining in which TV programs to air your ads in, he asked audience whether they know what BBC is? we all responded in chorus that its the British Broadcasting Corporation and he shook his head and told its the programs "Biwi See" and husbands has no choice but to sit with them and watch the same :).

The next in line was Mr. Rajesh Jain, MD, NetCore Solutions, who talked about the technical aspects of digital strategy. The last to speak in this session was Mr. David Appasamy , CCO, Sify Technologies Ltd. He showed some really brilliant ads during his presentation

BMW Star Ad

Air New Zealand Ad

Epuron Ad

The last session for the day was "Social Entrepreneurship" which had three speakers sharing their views. I personally liked the presentation made by Mr. Venkat Subramanian, MD, Matchbox Solutions. He was frank enough to admit that he never thought of vision and mission for his company when he founded it. It just took him 5 mins to come up with this name for his company and talking about different colors he has used in his logo he told he will be hiring an ad agency in future to find out which color stands for what :)? I thoroughly enjoyed his tongue-in-cheek humor.

So this way an eventful day came to an end. The Insight'09 punchline says "It doesn't get bigger than this" but at the end of day-1 I feel "It Just Got Bigger".

To know more about Insight visit:

http://liba.edu/insight/index.html

Regards,

Ravi.

Markit - The Marketing Club of LIBA (Part I Cont..) Some Posters

Markit - The Marketing Club of LIBA (Part I)

When I joined LIBA I had made up my mind to specialize in finance. I had recently read the book "Banker to the Poor" by Muhammad Yunus of Grameen Bank and was fascinated by the power of micro-finance( the fascination was short lived as I made my worst presentation ever in my Economics paper on micro-finance). Then this Markit competition("Your Mark, You Differentiate it") happened, thanks to my immediate seniors who had undertaken the brand revitalization of the club, and my tagline differentiated the mark enough to win the first prize in that event. My seniors wanted people from our batch who were interested in joining the club irrespective of the domain we were going to specialize in and with some initial inhibitions I gave my name for the same. Seniors briefed all the volunteers(there were 20 of us) from my batch about the next event( to spoof any vodafone TVC) and told us that this event has to be conducted solely by us, juniors.

Trust me, this was the event which made me reconsider my plans to specialize in Finance( and by the end of my first year there were other factors too which made me hate finance more than I love Marketing) . The event got tremendous response from all the LIBAites and I developed a keen interest in advertising while shooting my own entry for the spoof. A first prize in this event for my team cemented my bond with the Markit club and of course Marketing. So here I am in my 2nd year heading the Markit club and specializing purely in Marketing :). To know more about Markit please follow the following link :

http://liba.edu/markit/index.html