<b>Alokananda Chakraborty:</b> Two questions for advertisers

With the Goafest right round the corner, it is pertinent to ask how the organisers plan to keep out scam ads and celebrate the Big Idea

The Goafest, considered a marquee annual event in India's advertising calendar, is just a few weeks away. The call for entries for the 2015 edition is now closed; the judges have already started assessing the body of work that has been submitted. This seems like the right time to ask two questions: one, what are the festival organisers doing to keep away scam ads from featuring at the festival? And two, at a time when marketers are beginning to rely heavily on big data, is there still a place for the Big Idea in advertising? I ask the second question because from what I have seen so far this year and all of last year, there are very few - to use some adjectives borrowed from advertising folks themselves - genre-busting, clutter-sabotaging advertising of the, say, Vodafone pup variety.

But first things first: how to keep out scam ads. One good thing that came out of the 2013 Ford Figo mess was that Indian award festivals became more stringent in assessing the advertising work, many more checks and balances were put in place to figure out if a piece of advertising is pro bono or legitimate, and to make the judges themselves more accountable. You see, one needs these controls to be firmly in place because advertising is probably the only industry where creativity is used as a tool to deliver a completely business-driven objective. And whatever detractors say, creativity does need a context for its worth to be measured; otherwise it becomes a case of artistic expression, which, in turn, makes it totally subjective. So, one has to cut out that possibility to improve the chances of the industry being respected and recognised, if for nothing else.

So, since last year, there's a system in place wherein all the work that gets shortlisted by the first round jury is put up online for all to see and comment. This makes the whole process less hush-hush; if someone has a problem with a certain piece of work he/she is free to bring it to the notice of the jury, who will then see if the claim is authentic or not and keep or scrap the advertisement according to the findings.

It has also been made clear that the decision of the judges from there on is final - there could be no demands for reassigning the jury. The award festival has also put in place stringent controls to ensure there is no leakage of information ahead of the award announcements - jury members are barred from speaking out of turn either to the media or the people in their respective organisations about the progress of the judging process.

These controls have been in place since last year and we know for a fact that there was very little trouble around the festival time in 2014.

Now, the second question: where does creativity fit in in today's advertising, where clients put in a lot of weight on measurability, accountability, deliverability et al? Will the Big Idea get drowned in all the noise around Big Data?

The problem really starts with the amount of data available to marketers today. In the marketing world, Big Data pertains to the information gathered by monitoring consumers as they browse websites, search and purchase online and how they socialise, besides data gathered offline from the shops they visit, the products they browse and buy and so on. Every time a consumer visits a website or a retail outlet, she leaves a trail of information, which is sliced and diced and becomes a call-to-action for marketers.

While Big Data - or any data for that matter - is key to advertising effectiveness, there are experts who believe marketers and their agencies are beginning to rely heavily on data, using it almost as an excuse to avoid taking risk. For them, there could be very little role for good old-fashioned intuition and judgement in a discipline that should be totally objective.

Well, just a small reminder here: the biggest and most successful brand in the world, Apple, never much relied on consumer research to develop its ad campaigns.