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`Made in India model' proposed for advertisement industry

P.S. Suryanarayana

Adasia 05 concludes in Singapore

SINGAPORE: As the three-day international conference on advertising, `Adasia 05', concluded here on Wednesday on a note of "creating the future," an Indian corporate executive proposed a "Made in India model" for this globalised industry.

Suggesting the model of "strategic partnership" between the advertisement agencies and their respective clients, Anil Kapoor, managing director and chief executive officer of FCB-ULKA, commended the concept, now being practised in India.

With the relative importance of advertising and public relations coming up for scrutiny at the conference, Mr. Kapoor emphasised that the model, as adapted to the historically knowledge-driven Indian society, would show up the relevance of advertising to overall marketing strategies.

He said the idea was that the advertisement agencies and their clients should function as "equal partners." The creative task of the agencies in such an environment would be to fashion "business-defining ideas." Towards this end, it would be necessary to "broaden the definition of creativity." Mr. Kapoor pointed out that some Indian firms were now making a mark in the global marketplace by adopting this approach.

Exploring what Asia could offer the rest of the world in the advertisement industry, Seong Soo Hwang, vice-president of South Korea's Samsung Electronics, said the firm had "not predicted the future, (but) created it" in anticipating and meeting consumer needs. Mr. Seong said the company would "not intend to create a Korean or an Asian image" for itself and would, instead, think in global terms.

Bharat Patel, chairman of Procter&Gamble in India, emphasised that "globally, consumers want the same kind of benefits."

Also, people increasingly tended to "buy lifestyles, not products" in an emerging environment of intensive "360-degree marketing."

Ideas that gained currency during the discussions ranged from the market-place viability of Schumpeter's vision of "creative destruction" to the importance of "content" and "irreverent" but useful "creativity."

A participant posed the question whether the current trends in the communications industry might make traditional advertising quite irrelevant to the point of forcing future conferences to shift focus accordingly.

About being in the Internet business in China, Hurst Lin, chief operating officer of Sina.com, said, "We do have to navigate through regulations ... as a good corporate citizen. While this might be seen as being politically correct," the idea of doing Internet business in China was very appealing, it was emphasised.

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`Made in India model' proposed for advertisement industry

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