A walk through a museum for the ad man

Manish and Raghu are at it again. The enterprising duo is putting the final touches on the informative webpage that they started two years ago. Ready for the world to view now is the Ad-Museum, which features all that has been noteworthy in the world of advertising. The Ad-Museum can be reached at www.ad-museum.info

Manish Bhatt and Raghu Bhat, both vice-presidents and executive creative directors at Contract Advertising, took up the idea pro bono because they wanted to create an archive for the world of advertising. In doing so, they realised a dream they’d had since their college days. Bhatt says, “When I was studying, commercial art was looked down upon as a profession. We wanted to change that notion.”

Though the webpage isn’t completely ready yet, another two weeks should see enough content for one to go through. A registration form will be available on the site.

Clarifying that it isn’t similar to other webpages that cater to advertising, such as adsoftheworld.com, the two say that unlike adsoftheworld.com, ad-museum.info will not have user generated content; instead, there will be filtration. The initial filtration will be carried out by Bhatt and Bhat. But eventually, a panel of industry stalwarts will sift through the entries.

A soft launch was conducted at the Goafest two years ago, where T-shirts with the Ad-Museum logo was distributed among young talented professionals.

Ad-Museum.info will conduct a contest for advertising and design students, in which they will have to submit their book or portfolio by registering themselves on the site. The registration form for the contest will go live in about two weeks. There is no prize as such, but the best portfolios will be sent to various creative houses and then ranked. These rankings will be put up on the site and thus form a referral point.