Alokananda Chakraborty
Advertising

AdAsia 2003: Roadshow to hit Bangalore

The next destination on AdAsia’s roadshow map is Bangalore. It would be held at the Oberoi Hotel on September 5

Just a couple of months away, the Asian Advertising Congress - AdAsia 2003 - is busy touring the country before it finally halts at Jaipur on November 10, 2003. The next destination on its roadshow map is Bangalore. It would be held at the Oberoi Hotel on September 5. This would be AdAsia's fifth roadshow after Hyderabad, Delhi, Chennai and Mumbai. Kolkata might follow the Bangalore roadshow, but the organisers - The Asian Federation of Advertising Associations (AFAA) and Advertising Council of India (ACI) - are undecided about the date at the moment.

Roadshows have been the traditional mode of promoting the AdAsia event, wherever it has been held in Asia earlier. Besides taking the roadshow route, AdAsia 2003 plans to launch a series of print and TV advertisements very soon. The campaign has been created by Piyush Pandey (group president and national creative director, Ogilvy & Mather), who has also designed the AdAsia logo - a matchbox with a caparisoned elephant on it.

The format of the roadshow remains the same. Goutam Rakshit, managing director, Advertising Avenues, also member of the AFAA general body and chairman, ACI, introduces the congress to the advertising, media and marketing community through a short-film presentation. More importantly, what these roadshows do is get the community together to spark some new ideas, which is the raison d'etre for AdAsia.

AdAsia was conceived by a group of Japanese advertising professionals with the view to creating a platform where ad folk of the same region could profit from interacting with each other. It began in 1958, in Tokyo, Japan, and was called The First Asian Advertising Conference. Twenty-eight Asian advertising professionals participated in the congress. However, at the second meet, which was held after two years, in Tokyo again, the event was renamed The Asian Advertising Congress. Since then, the AdAsia congress has been held in an Asian country every two years. The platform of AdAsia has been broadened along the way. At this year's meet, for example, stalwarts from media and marketing disciplines would rub shoulders with top advertising practitioners of the world.

The AdAsia Organising Commitee is particularly happy about the fact that this year it did not have to seek any financial assistance from AFAA (which commissions grants for promoting AdAsia). The committee has raised all the money from sponsorships, with the principal sponsor for this year's event being the Aditya Birla Group. © 2003 agencyfaqs!

Have news to share? Write to us atnewsteam@afaqs.com