Curating Life

ClickZ Column: Future of TV

Pushkar Sane — Tue, 08 May 2012 14:58:31 +0000

Television has ruled the advertising and marketing world for decades. Emotions run high every time people talk about Future of TV. I have been thinking about this topic for a while and given below is a link to my Clickz column on Future of TV. I do hope to start a debate with this.

http://www.clickz.asia/6795/future_of_tv

Moms: Proud sponsors of P&G

Pushkar Sane — Wed, 18 Apr 2012 14:29:21 +0000

This morning I came across a beautiful video created by P&G for 2012 London Olympics. It captures all the efforts mothers put in so that their Children to participate in activities and win. It emphasized the fact that being a mom is the hardest job in the world but it’s also the best job in the world. Here is the Video:

I loved the video except the sponsorship message at the end. It had a logos of Tide, Pampers, Gillette & Duracell. I wonder what Gillette had to do with mothers. Duracell also seemed like a long stretch. Looks like P&G’s individual brands sponsoring various Olympic teams wanted some association with this beautiful video and some brand manager thought it was great tag on. Finally the video ended with a P&G Olympic Logo stating: P&G Proud Sponsor of Moms. The message made me think. Frankly speaking Moms are sponsoring Brands by buying them again and again. I wonder in which way P&G in Sponsoring Moms? The products are not given away free. They’re created to increase the shareholder value. So I think it is completely out of context. In my opinion if they really wanted to acknowledge Moms then the message should have been: Thank you Moms for sponsoring P&G.

Benchmark for Innovation

Pushkar Sane — Mon, 16 Apr 2012 09:48:29 +0000

I just read a very nice blog post by Suman Srivastava titled ‘If you’re in a commodity market, it’s your fault’.

It reminded me of a meeting that happened a few years ago. My team had come up with a very interesting idea and it was never done before. I felt it was a very powerful idea and would have given competitive advantage to the client. But this very well qualified (MBA from a leading b-school) MNC Brand Manager asked me to provide benchmark/best practice for the innovation before we could execute it. I was quite shocked. I argued that either we could give him benchmark or an innovative idea but we couldn’t possibly give him both things together. Because benchmark usually meant several other people had successful executed that idea. He was quite annoyed and said: ‘it is your fault. If you don’t know how to give me benchmarks that helps me in justifying the idea to my bosses and wider stakeholders then you have failed completely’.

I had no choice but to accept my failure and walk out of that meeting. And I’m glad I did it.