Gauravonomics Blog

Michael Parekh picked up my ‘Oneupmanship in the Indian Sky’ post and wrote an interesting post about advertising as conversation -

Not a day goes by where we don’t see high profile bloggers get in each other’s faces, creating drama and soap operas, by saying what they really think, and letting their emotions hang out.

So the question that naturally follows is, why SHOULDN’T this be true for advertisers online?

It’s a radical thought, and I love radical thoughts, but I don’t see corporates using advertising as a conversation tool anytime soon, for the same reasons corporates rarely use CEO-blogging as a conversation tool (and, yes, I have read Naked Conversations). To participate in a conversation, you need to know that the conversation is bigger than yourself, you need to listen more and talk less, and you you need to be ready to admit that you don’t have all the answers. Corporates are not very good at any of these things.

Advertising (and CEO-blogs) will begin to become more like conversations when the three billboards in my previous post look like this -

Jet Airways: “A BIG ‘Thank You’ to all our competitors: you made us change!”