Horseshit, and how to clean it up

It was a fairly lacklustre start to the Goafest Advertising Conclave. I got the impression that there were more journalists than senior media and advertising people in the room. If it weren't for Pratham Raj Sinha (CEO of the Anand Bazar Patrika Group) and his enlightening speech, we would all have come away thinking that the even the tip of the iceberg wasn't touched.

Taking the advertising industry from Rs 15000 crores to Rs 50000 crores may be no mean feat. But as Dr Sinha opined, our industry seems bent on playing a 'zero sum' game, with egos and factions taking precedence over a common agenda of progress and growth. Unless drastic steps are taken by its associations, and clear thought leadership emerges, we may not make it. I liked his analogy of the 17th century London city council fearing that they had such a problem of horses defecating in the streets, that within a short time the streets of London would be steeped in horse manure.

But how do we clean up the horseshit? Hopefully the panelists tomorrow will shed some light. In the meantime, I am going to bed pondering over the more encouraging words of Martin Sorell delivered by videotape - that Indian advertising has been growing at twice the rate of our GDP growth, and that we should not doubt our abilities so much. So true. Four hundred years later, the streets of London are still pretty clean, aren't they? Lesson : replace the horses, the horseshit will go.