The First Step, Genesis.

Hi. My name is Karthik and I am starting this blog on behalf of Ad Club Madras and my batch mates. The idea behind this blog is to make more individuals aware and interested in the advertising industry by letting them know how this industry works as this is a much unsung enterprise and not many know the wheels within wheels of the advertising industry.

For those of you who have no idea what Ad Club Madras is all about, let me expound as to what we are and what we do.

“Ad Club Madras is the premier industry organization for advertising professionals in Chennai and South India.

The Ad club Madras was formally founded on 7 April 1956.  Though registered as ‘Club’, the Club has grown into an institution educating, entertaining and enlarging the thought process of those in the industry. It is perhaps the only Ad Club in India which has a variety of activities including sports and entertainment going beyond the usual meeting seminars, awards and conferences.”

Now this is what is given in our website. Makes us sound like a really posh and sophisticated ol’ club where elderly ladies and gents from the industry meet for evening tea, play a game of bridge and pool and leave for home when they’ve de-stressed themselves. Well, this is what we are not. Or rather, that is what it is not to me or us.

Now you are going to ask who this “me” is or who these “us” are and what is that we do?

We are a group of students studying a course initiated by the Ad Club Madras in the year 1994. This is what our official site has to say about this course. My friends and I are studying in the 15^th batch that started on August 6^th 2008 and we are eighteen in number.

“Post Graduate Diploma Advertising Management

Advertising is growing in dynamic proportions, providing splendid opportunities around the world, and we at the Advertising Club Madras discovered that the southern part of the country has lacked a professionally maintained course to develop and motivate the upcoming ad personnel. As a result of this, the Ad Club along with a group of highly reputed advertising professionals initiated the Post Graduate Diploma in Advertising Management program in the year 1994.”

All said in the above paragraph is true so I am not going to be making any changes to that. We are seventeen in number and this course is for nine months. We enjoy our classes immensely. Now don’t start thinking that I’m advertising what I am studying because I am not. And even you if you still continue to do so, well, I don’t have a problem with it since we really do enjoy our classes. We have people from all over the city coming and sharing their knowledge with us.

Notice how I said “sharing their knowledge” rather than lecturing us? Well, that is because we are not lectured. All our lecturers come to teach us what they’ve learnt rather than come to teach us what we have to learn. And since we are studying in the fifteenth batch of this course, so we have former students coming in to teach us what they’ve learnt.

In one of the above paragraphs as well as in our website, you will find the reason for the Ad Club Madras to be started. Every venture has an idea or reason behind it. So finally I come to the reason why this blog has been started. To tell you the truth, I really have no idea. The Ad Club Madras, with its glorious fifty nine years of existence, had its website recently launched on October 1^st 2008. And then one of our lecturers* whose name is Nytik Joshi said we should start a blog and showed us the blog of an institute called Chennai Business School. Not much of a response then… Then we had another instructor whose name is Kiruba Shankar who assigned me the task of starting this blog. I was asked to start this blog on 31^st of October but I thought I’d start with a new month so that’s that.

To begin with, I had no idea what to write here, but then again, once you start, it never stops, if you’ve read all this way and still not cursing me, I thank you very much for being ever so patient with me. Now coming as to what will feature in this blog, my initial ideas were to match what I’ve seen in the Chennai Business School blog, to write what happened in class and what we learnt there, but then again, I am not so sure as to what will get posted here for there are people with me with diverse ideas who will contribute more than what is going on in class. So with hopes to write again very soon, I shall end with this blog for now.

I thank both Mr. Nytik Joshi and Mr. Kiruba Shankar in helping me, rather pushing me into starting this blog. A push that, I am more than happy to have got.

Karthik Hariharan

* I use this word at the moment for I do not, as of the moment, find a good word to describe what they are to us. They are more than lecturers, something more in the lines of guides and counselors.