Ad Club, AAAI ‘explore’ joint awards

MUMBAI: Advertising Agencies Association India (AAAI ) and Ad Club Bombay have held a meeting to iron out differences and constitute a unified awards programme.

Kalpana Rao, president, Ad Club, who attended the meeting of the two advertising award institutions, said she didn’t want to jump the gun, and would only give comments when the situation successfully pans out.

There seems to be a deadlock over what the unified awards ceremony would be called. The main issues discussed were: financials, brand name for the joint awards, categories and systems and processes.

Will politics or ego-tangles derail or delay the process? K V Sridhar, national creative director, Leo Burnett, says, “The big question is — whose name would precede whose?

Would it be the AAAI-Abby awards? Or the AdClub-AAAI awards? The systems and processes are mostly the same, in both the awards. Also, there is a big gulf as far as the culture of the two awards goes.

The ABBYS is all about culture, tradition, pedigree and about the new melting into the old. AAAI is a young, bubbling ad-festival, positioned on the lines of Cannes — very modern and very contemporary. Where shall the twain meet?”