Goafest announces speaker line-up for Industry Conclave

Goafest 2010 has announced the speaker line-up for the industry leadership conclave. Titled ‘2010: Time to Grow’, this year’s session will see industry opinion leaders introspect, debate, define and arrive at plans to achieve desired growth rates. The business conclave will commence at 3pm on 8 April.

Commenting on the theme for this year, Sam Balsara, chairman of the Conclave said, "After growing at nearly 20% year on year for 5 years, the advertising market dipped in 2009 by as much as 10%. It's time to grow now and make up for lost time with sharp strategies and plans to develop brands, markets, creativity, media markets and research. A must-attend event for CEOs with growth and profit responsibility."

The conclave's first session will kick-off with Tom Doctoroff, CEO – JWT, China and author of the bestseller 'Billions' who will give tips on what India can learn from China on ‘How to use advertising for growth and in turn how to grow advertising market’.

In the second session, Piyush Mathur - MD, Nielsen South-Asia; Shiv Moulee - chief client officer and director global solutions board, Millward Brown; Rajaram Narayan, VP (hair care and Lakme event) Hindustan Unilever; Piyush Pandey - O&M and Arun Tadanki  - CEO, Yahoo will come together to discuss if for a developing market like India, are our brands growing fast enough? Some of the topics under discussion will be whether creativity is rising to the occasion to drive and grow brands. Given the increasing noise and clutter in Indian media, has creativity risen far enough to make brands stand out and make an impact? What do the figures from markets and brand tracks reveal? What do advertisers say based on what is happening in the market place?

In the third session, Shashi Sinha, Lodestar Universal; Bhaskar Das - Times of India; Uday Shankar - STAR; Ronnie Screwvala - UTV; Minnie Menon - Bloomerberg UTV and Ajit Balakrishnan - Rediff.com will ponder on media spends. They will debate whether Indian media is under-priced, how Indian media CPTs compare with other BRIC countries, neighbouring countries and the West and whether the advertising pie will ever grow without corresponding growth of sales of products and services it promotes.

The fourth session will see Srinivasan Swamy of RK Swamy BBDO; L K Gupta – CMO, LG and Shireesh Joshi - Airtel present a case on building agency capabilities. The only way advertisers can reap benefits of higher returns on advertising investment is if agencies invest in resources and systems, substantially raising the bar on their capabilities through innovation and investment. Are agencies doing enough? What stops them from doing more? Are agencies getting distracted from their core function of creativity by going into different verticals that make more money than basic creativity? Is this because clients are not paying adequately for creativity? The session will try to answer the above questions.

The fifth session will witness L V Krishnan of TAM; Ashok Das of Hansa Research and Mahmood Ahmed of ITC collaborate thoughts on media research. Most media owners complain that media research tends to underplay their numbers and that the numbers reported by research are much lower than what exists in the market place. What is the truth? What is holding research back? Who should pay for research? Whose responsibility is better media research?