Rays, Reflections & Refractions | Pushkar Sane

Training or Learning

Pushkar Sane — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 13:19:18 +0000

I was chatting with a set of industry friends on importance of digital. My friends from analogue side of the business kept insisting that they all need more training to adopt digital. To that point I asked a very simple question – “how much more training is required before you’re confident in digital” – unfortunately none of them could give me a specific answer in terms of topics, number of hours, etc.

This conversation made me very sad. Advertising & Marketing industry is so much focused on receiving training rather than taking the initiative to learn. Most people give convenient excuse of ‘lack of enough training’ for not learning digital. What they fail to understand is no amount of training can make you confident unless you learn things and then practice to master them.

After having spent 20 years on the Internet I still wake up thinking ‘oh god so much to learn today’ and spend at least 30-60 minutes learning new things. I have never attended a digital training program but it hasn’t stopped me from learning all things new. And believe me I’m not alone as I see millions of professional learning on their own.

I think it is high time for the industry to ‘stop’ receiving training and ‘start’ learning.

Stretching Birthday

Pushkar Sane — Sun, 29 Aug 2010 14:09:30 +0000

I celebrated my birthday on 22nd August. Thanks to all the social platforms wishes started pouring in from the 20th and continued till the 24th. It took me several hours to acknowledge birthday wishes and thank people individually. I kinda felt compelled to do that given the effort put in by my time-starved network to wish me. Social networks are certainly extending key moments/celebrations in our lives. I guess in a few years from now we might end up celebrating Birthweek rather than Birthday.

Less Boring

Pushkar Sane — Sat, 28 Aug 2010 14:57:10 +0000

On Friday I visited a tier 3 town in Guangdong, China. We were doing an immersion exercise with a task to understand media and technology habits. We interacted with a cross-section (age-group) of people. It was very fascinating to see how each and everyone of them insisted that they were time-starved and had no time to watch TV. Here is an example where the TV is ON but no one is watching.

In order to find out their device/media dependency we asked them to choose only one device that they can’t live without. Interestingly almost all of them said Mobile Phone. One youngster answered that he is choosing Mobile because it iss ‘LESS BORING’ than other devices/media.

I guess the era of choosing a product/brand/device because it is ‘more interesting’ is over. For the younger generations novelty factor depreciates right after the launch announcement (not even an actual launch) and then it is all about choosing best of the ‘less boring’ options available in the market.

I can very easily predict that life for marketing & advertising professionals is certainly going to be difficult.