Anant’s blog: We hope you admit it’s getting better

When we covered the last Goafest, Campaign India was seven months old.

Now, we’re a year and seven months old.

We launched www.campaignindia.in at the last Goafest – and the launch was a disaster. It was just too much, too soon.

We hadn’t accounted for minor things like power cuts at The Leela, resulting in our design computer’s hard disk crashing.

And since our priority was to publish a daily print newsletter at Goa, we aborted the dotcom effort, deciding we would sort it out after the Goafest.

This year will be fun.

We’ve got an edit team that is more mature (at least one year more mature). We have a back-up designer (last year it was a one-man team). We have power back up, a couple of spike guards, an extra hard disk and all the original, licensed software on a CD.

We’ve planned the work better.

And we have sponsors who know us. Dainik Bhaskar Group is the sponsor of the newsletters –one single advertiser across all three days. And they’ve put together creative bearing in mind who the reader is. Not just slapped together some boring stuff, but ads that will bring a smile to your face and will be remembered.

And NDTV Media is the sponsor of all the stuff you will read – and, hopefully, enjoy —on the dotcom. One single advertiser, again.

We print at a press which we are now familiar with, and copies will reach delegates at select hotels and as they walk into the venue on Friday and Saturday, and will reach them at their hotels and at the airport on Sunday. The same production team and the same circulation team that managed the headaches last year will manage (hopefully fewer and smaller) headaches this year as well.

All this means we will have a significantly better product this year for all our readers to enjoy.

And the big one is this – all of you who couldn’t make it to Goafest can stay completely updated by visiting this site during the course of the next three days. For registered subscribers of the dotcom, don’t bother checking the site. We’ll update you with newsletters, bulletins and breaking news alerts in your inbox or on your mobile phone.

I’ll be blogging a few times a day. Not reporting on the proceedings, but talking of many things, cabbages and kings.

Use the comments option to tell us what you what, what is lacking, what doesn’t work, what is terrific and what sucks.

We’ll keep reading your feedback and fine-tune the product as we go along.

Thank you for reading this. Thank you for supporting www.campaignindia.in this last year – and thank you for the support in the years to come.