Alokananda Chakraborty
Advertising

AICAR to conduct "experiential workshop" for ad professionals

The Asian Institute of Communication and Research is organizing the workshop with the objective of understanding the creative process and recognizing the Big Idea

The Asian Institute of Communication and Research (AICAR) is organizing a two-day "experiential workshop" for advertising professionals at the AICAR campus at Neral, Maharashtra, on Feb 14 and 15. The objective behind the workshop is to "help understand the creative process, and get into the innards of what constitutes an Idea", says HTA's erstwhile national creative head Ivan Arthur, who is currently trustee and dean (communications) at AICAR. The workshop would be particularly useful to middle-level executives in agencies, adds Rajeev Raja, executive creative director, Bates India, who, along with Arthur and Prabhakar Mundkur (president, Everest Integrated Communications), will be conducting the workshop.

The highlight of the two-day session, Arthur informs, would be the use of "music as a metaphor for exploring the Idea". The workshop will see Arthur (on the mandolin), Mundkur (on the guitar) and Raja (on the flute) drawing parallels between jazz music and the different aspects of ideation and creative advertising. "I love metaphors, and I love the metaphor of music in the creative process," Arthur explains, speaking to agencyfaqs! from Neral. "The business of advertising is not to arrive at the ‘correct' alone, but to arrive at the ‘surprising' as well. Jazz is all about springing delightful surprises on the listener. Now what is remarkable about jazz is that while it is surprising, the surprises are also inevitable. And they are often the only or ‘correct' way in the composition. But the surprise happens because there is a creation of expectation, which is then surpassed by a little twist here and there. That is exactly the way with the Big Idea - it is both inevitable and surprising."

Arthur reveals that the use of the music metaphor is something that he has done in the past - but only with recorded music. "I had an idea of doing a live workshop with Louis Banks for ITC, but at the last moment, it fell through," he says a mite regretfully. The opportunity to do a ‘live workshop', however, afforded itself some two months ago, when he roped in Raja and Mundkur for a session with students at AICAR. "The objective was to show students the process that a creative person goes through, and how an advertising idea gets created," says Raja. "We focused on how there is a need to ‘unthink' and ‘unlearn', and how ideas get generated by stringing together random and disparate thoughts. Then Prabs (Mundkur) did a session of consumer insights, which looked at how popular forms of music are also rooted in consumer insights. We did all this using music as a base, and the entire workshop was worked out very well. That's when we decided to take it to the industry."

While Raja avers that the sessions will be "great fun and very interactive", Arthur assures that the format is extremely novel. "Yes, in terms of the takeout, you may have overlaps with what has already been said by so many creative thinkers, but the format is something that nobody has done before," he says. "We shall also be having a session on creative meditation, conducted by Dr Kutty of the institute. The whole workshop has to be experiential, and we want the participants to take the most out of it." He reveals that quite a few ad professionals from JWT India, TBWA India, Leo Burnett India, Triton Communications and Madison Communications have confirmed their participation. "We even have four people from Bates, Sri Lanka," he smiles. © 2004 agencyfaqs!

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