Welcome address by S K Swamy at the
AAAI Diamond Jubilee Valedictory Function
on 2nd August, 2006

Friends,

It gives me great pleasure to welcome everyone of you to this AAAI Diamond Jubilee Valedictory function. This evening is primarily intended to honour the great women and men who have built AAAI to what it is today. We are privileged to have 12 of the possible 15 past presidents here with us. I am particularly touched by the presence of two of our past presidents who have come in from outside of Mumbai – Mr Bal Mundkur from Goa & Mr Ram Sehgal, all the way from Pondicherry. It is indeed an honour to welcome you gentlemen. Equally I am delighted to welcome the ten other Past Presidents from Mumbai – Ms Nargis Wadia our forever young, senior most past president who is alive and well today, Mr Ahmed Ibrahim, Mr Roger Pereira, Mr Avinash Jain, Mr Krishan Premnarayen, Mr Goutam Rakshit, Mr Arun Nanda, Mr Anil Kapoor, Mr Ramesh Narayan and Mr Sam Balsara. We are missing only three past presidents – Mr S R Ayer and Ms Tara Sinha – because they are not in the country and Mr Mike Khanna, because he has not been keeping well. We are indeed grateful to all the past presidents for their presence and participation today and I welcome them most sincerely in our midst.

We have to welcome Nick Brien, President & CEO of Universal McCann who has specially flown in from New York for this function today. Thank you Nick, for your support to AAAI and agreeing to be our Chief Guest for the evening. We really appreciate your presence.

AAAI always enjoyed a special relationship with The Indian Society of Advertisers, The Indian Newspaper Society and The Indian Broadcasting Foundation. We have three stalwarts from these august bodies. I have great pleasure in welcoming Mr Bharat Patel, Chairman, ISA, Mr Jacob Mathew, President, INS and Mr Jawahar Goel, Vice President and acting president, IBF. They readily agreed to take part in our function today and honour us. Both Mr Mathew and Mr Goel have specially come in from Kottayam and Delhi respectively to be our guests this evening. We are indeed indebted to them. We have a number of friends from media houses who have specially flown in to be with us tonight. A special welcome to all of them. And to our members and special invitees – welcome and thank you for coming.

60 years ago our association was founded in Calcutta. 25 years ago this association was moved from Calcutta and registered afresh in Mumbai. Technically this is AAAI’s diamond jubilee as well as its silver jubilee in its new avatar. The advertising industry was hardly US$ 1 million (at today’s exchange rate) when the association was founded. When the association was transferred to Mumbai 35 years later in 1981, the volume had gone up 40 times to $ 40 million. And over the next 25 years i.e. as of today the volume has gone up 80 times to $3.2 billion.

AAAI has not only witnessed these gigantic strides but have also significantly shaped the progress these momentous 6 decades. Our illustrious past presidents and their team have stepped in to protect our business interests on many occasions – be it to remove tax on advertising way back in 1965 and again in 1978 and 1983, or to defend the agency commission on government businesses that were proposed to be taken away on a number of occasions.

When advertising was introduced in the electronic media in the late seventies and also when it turned to colour in 1982, AAAI was determining with Doordarshan what its commercial policies should be. About 7 years ago, AAAI encouraged and supported the formation of Indian Broadcasting Foundation. Ever since AAAI enjoys a special relationship with this television body, with the joint committee meeting every month to address issues of common interest and to ensure timely payments to the broadcasters.

Our relationship with INS has moved along from an adversarial position to that of great partnership in the last 20 years. It was in 1983 that AAAI and INS had to last lock horns when INS wanted to reduce the credit period from 75 to 45 days. This was finally amicably settled with an agreement of 60 days. In 1991, when INS proposed to reduce the credit period to 45 days, this was defended by AAAI in a friendly manner.

Our relationship with ISA has been very healthy. Many payment disputes between agencies and advertisers have been resolved through discussions or even formal arbitration proceedings. Recently, ISA and AAAI took a joint stand against indiscriminate pitches by advertisers and have recommended a professional way for selection of an agency. I am sure that this will pave the way for many such joint initiatives.

AAAI has supported the formation of Advertising Standards Council of India, which today is widely respected for the role it plays in the self-regulation movement in the country.

AAAI also has been behind readership and the audience measurement studies in the country. Today it is an integral part of the National Readership Studies Council, a body promoted by Audit Bureau of Circulations, INS and AAAI. And this NRS study is available for free, to all AAAI members, thanks to the work of some of our past presidents in this connection.

Last July when we kick started our Diamond Jubilee Celebrations we had an agenda that sought to renew our engagement with our various constituents and make it more relevant to today’s needs. On reflection, I believe we have achieved that objective in some good measure. With our media friends in both INS and IBF, we are engaged in a very meaningful manner with the object of genuinely solving their problems and issues with our members and vice versa. Our members have come to recognise that AAAI have their interest at heart – we know this form the various requests we get and the solutions that we have found for many of their concerns.

During the Diamond Jubilee year, we wanted to create the most coveted creative awards in the country, which we succeeded in some good measure. We rechristened and re-launched our awards programme in a festival format over 2 days in Goa naming it Goafest. We had nearly 1200 people participating, and for the first time special arrangements were made for young advertising people to take part in our show. This gathering I am told is bigger than any other gathering of advertising related people seen in India till date.

The Diamond Jubilee year saw many new events organised by AAAI. We had a couple of Advertising Seminars and a Advertising Conclave in association with IBF, we had a Creative Seminar which coincided with the Goafest, we had a couple of competitions for sending creative people to Cannes and Adfest etc.

An important outcome from the Goafest is also the setting up of the AAAI Benevolent Fund, a Trust that is being set up to support people from the advertising agency industry whose families may have unfortunately hit hard times, for a variety of reasons. Part of the excess money from Goafest would be transferred to this Trust and used appropriately.

As we bring the curtain down on the Diamond Jubilee celebrations, we are conscious that there are a couple of issues that are still work in progress that are to be completed during this year: The book on the history of advertising in India, and the advertising campaign on the needs of the ad industry. These, I assure you, would be done sooner than later!

To us at the Executive Committee, the Diamond Jubilee has been a rewarding year. We felt that the true way to celebrate our success is to celebrate the people behind the success – the people who have made a difference to AAAI by putting the industry before their family or business and have given their best at times of need. Let me invite your attention to the screens where we will have 12 past presidents give their views of what has changed and what has not in the industry and their advice for tomorrow. We did this so as to save time tonight and to have their views in our archives for posterity.

Run the tape please.

Thank you. These interviews and the editing thereof were made possible through the offices of Mudra Videotech and Madhukar Kamath. Thank you Madhukar for your support and the terrific production. The full interviews of all these past presidents are available in our website – www.aaai.in. Please do visit the site and enjoy the full interview.

Our members at AAAI have been very kind to me. They have chosen me to lead the association for the third successive year at the AGM couple of days ago. This puts enormous responsibility on me and I can assure our members that their faith has not been misplaced. I am grateful to all the members of my Executive Committees over the last two years who have supported me and encouraged me in many of the new initiatives undertaken by us at AAAI. Without their support and untiring contribution, your association would not be what it is today. Thank you gentlemen at the Executive Committee, for your dedication and involvement in getting our association in to top gear.

Now it is my turn to honour each of the past presidents with a Diamond Jubilee memento. May I request our Hony. Secretary to call out their names so that our hon’ble past presidents can come forward and allow us to present them with a memento that signifies our gratitude to each one of them.

Thank you.