The flagship event of Advent 2008 was the advertising workshop Adrena, conducted by Mr Parveen Ahluwalia, a consultant in the field of strategic brand management. The workshop was followed by an ad-designing contest, which pitted only the best team from each business school in a battle of creativity and insight, with the team from MICA eventually emerging triumphant.
Another highlight of Advent was Adaage, a talk series graced by some of the most prominent professionals from the area of advertising and marketing. Mr Santosh Desai, who joined as MD and CEO of Future Brands after a highly successful stint as President and CEO of McCann-Erickson, delivered a speech on the nuances of advertising. Through a series of carefully selected commercials, he brought out the essence of advertising as appealing to people when they were people and not when they were conscious consumers. Mr Jitender Dabas, Vice-President and Strategic Planning Director of JWT, spoke about the death of traditional advertising and the future of the advertising industry in the emerging national economy. Mr Dabas expressed concern over the sourcing of talent for the advertising industry but sounded optimistic of change especially with pay packages in the industry being hiked in the United States. Mr Alok Marwaha, MD of Kloeckner Pentaplast India, related his experience of entrepreneurial marketing while establishing a Greenfield project for Renolit AG in Thailand.
Among other events held during Advent were Qariosity, the Blockbuster Connect Quiz, and GrafiTEE, the online t-shirt designing contest. Participation in Qariosity saw 300 teams from 27 business schools across the country trying their luck at the jackpot. In addition, there were on-the-spot audio-based ad identification contests, brand tagline-related dumb charades and impromptu speech contests. Prizes worth Rs 70,000 were sponsored by ICI Paints, Innocean and Myntra.com.
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