'Ad bodies should be more inclusive'

Whereas Nasscom has grown from being "a voice" of the information technology industry to being "the voice" of the industry, the Advertising Agencies Association of India (AAAI) has a lot to learn from the IT association's model that will help it create more value for the advertising industry through inclusiveness.

"There is a great deal of similarity between the advertising industry and the IT industry. One of them is that they both provide services," Kiran Karnik, former president of Nasscom said during his address on the first day of Goafest 2008, the three-day meeting of the advertising industry.

"Nasscom's biggest strength has been its inclusiveness, we included national, international, small and big IT companies. We heard all of them and thrashed out solutions to their problems collectively. Secondly we did not just try to find immediate solutions but made a long-term plan. We made a 10-year plan, which was not just a list of targets, but a roadmap of how we could achieve them."

The IT industry has grown over 10 times since the 1980s and is valued at Rs 200,000 crore, while the advertising industry stands at Rs 17,000 crore.

Ranjan Kapoor, country head, WPP India, said, "China, which is not even a consumption driven economy, has 85,000 registered advertising agencies and India has just 1,000. Yet we talk about competition and how the margins of agencies here are diminishing. We have to follow a model of inclusiveness and expand the competition like the IT industry did, because more competition would lead to expansion of the market."

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