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.