Kanchan views ad agencies in a shade of humour

The Madness Starts at 9 is a print collection of 25 articles written as blogs on Sulekha.com by Vinay Kanchan, an independent strategic consultant and ex-vice-president, Rediffusion Y&R.

A humorous take on life in an ad agency, Kanchan showcases the various situations faced by ad professionals through the eyes of the protagonist, Ram Shankar, an innocent, unbiased and sensible young man working as a trainee at the agency.

Situations such as secrecy during a pitch process, blindness vision workshops, ad professionals lying during interviews, phone calls received from headhunters and management of talent crisis situations are presented with a pinch of humour in the book.

He adds, “When I was at Rediffusion Y&R and had pitched for the Sulekha.com advertising account, I wrote a blog for the first time on an experimental basis. In order to experience the website, I created a blog on it and started writing about advertising. Since I received a good response from the readers, I continued it.” Kanchan’s blog, available at Vinaykanchan.sulekha.com, has 86 posts or articles.

Sulekha.com, which has published the book under its Blogprint initiative, selects popular blogs on its website based on the quality of the content and the feedback received from the readers’ community, and publishes them as books. The company has no intention of earning revenue from the book. Instead, it is doing this as a brand building activity and to give bloggers an opportunity to reach a wider audience.

Kanchan plans to carry on writing the blog and to get a second book published soon.