advertisements in india are creative

As a part 1 of this series, I would like to make an assertion that Indian advertisements are fairly creative even if they have social constraints to not go beyond certain boundaries.

A highly focused ad mechanism by a company in the buses in Mumbai. This takes advantage of c k prahlad's hypothesis about jewels at the bottom of the pyramid as well as creative marketing. Some creative entrepreneurial thought must have gone into this.

In my trip to India after 40 months, I wanted to experience every means of transport in Mumbai - the trains, the buses, the taxis, the autorickshaws, everything. I boarded a bus and lo behold, I found an entire system with a speaker system, a small screen and what not.

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Local ads can be directed into this device based on the payments by the local ad-spot bidders. This piqued my interest and I further delved into knowing about the company.

They are capturing a significant time spent by folks traveling. They can extend this concept to the first class compartments in the railways as well.

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They haven't yet made a facility to update ads real-time. The ads are still uploaded using some hardware mechanism. This will lead to lack of scalability after some time. The marginal cost will increase as the volumes increase and hence, they have to figure out a mechanism to uplink the unit in the bus using telecommunication device so that the content can be uploaded real time and assets can be tracked from a central location.

One could expect this in developed nations. However, in India, the entrepreneurs were scared about the investment due to potential losses due to multitude of reasons such as lack of public property safety, ability of generate adequate revenues, and technology limitations. However, apparently, noone had time or interest to do any harm to that screen. Yes, Mumbai has become so expensive that there is an implicit self-select mechanism built in. Even the slum dwellers are fairly civic conscious now!

India - lage raho....lage raho..

a graduate program in service management!

Check here for the new program at CMU for experienced candidates in the field of Service Management. It is being offered by Institute of Software Research in the School of Computer Science.

Already, ITIL v3's Service Strategy was successfully bid for authorship by one of the CMU folks (Majid Iqbal) earlier this decade. Now, ITSQC in conjunction with ISR and SCS has introduced this new program. The pitch sounds convincing. I wouldn't be surprised if PRC govt sends its folks to learn in this program in order to support their budgeted 5-year plan to increase services in China.