Symbiosis Institute of Media and Communication (SIMC), Pune, conducted its annual communication summit — COMVISAGE. The Corporate Interface Team (MBA) organised the event from September 6 to 7. The event marked the 20 years of the institute’s MBA programme and this year’s theme was ‘Communication paradoxes in the age of disruption.’
Owing to disruption in the media and communication industry, the strategic approach of communication has also changed, creating significant paradoxes. The event attempted to address the same.
The event was sponsored by “Skovian” as the media partner, “Nua” as the wellness partner and “Ugaoo” and “Mahindra Electrical” as the gift sponsors.
Dr Ruchi Jaggi, Director, SIMC, addressed the audience, shedding light on the central theme of the summit. Bibhash Banerjee, Principal at Dentsu India Tomorrow Lab and Member of the DAN South Asia Planning Council, spoke on the goldfish conundrum. He addressed the ever decreasing human attention span and discussed how brands can win over consumers with highly engaging content.
Aanam Chasmawalla, Founder and Creative Director of What When Wear, and advertising veteran Gerard Jayaranjan, Branding Consultant and Creative-at-large, highlighted the nuances of engaging content and how to create it.
The ‘Digital Space for New PR’ workshop conducted by Kosal Malladi, General Manager, Madison India, elaborated on the importance of exploring the digital space as a rapidly growing PR tool and the opportunities it brings with it.
Arun Vaswani, Founder of Augmentastic, spoke on AI-based insights into the field of marketing and communications.
Infusing an amalgamation of creativity and strategy into the art of pitching, Sumera Dewan, Associate Vice-President at Dentsu Webchutney, explained to the participants how to create the perfect pitch for clients by giving them practical learnings from her own experience.
Kaushal Agarwal, VP ‑ Client Operations at Merkle Sokrati, spoke on the technical and perceptual aspects on the paradox of demanding privacy whilst craving personalisation. He touched upon data science, the future of programmatic media planning, and driving positive experiences through data.
Day two: Storytelling, business transformation
Sonia Kulkarni, Managing Partner of Hunk Golden & Media, spoke on transforming crises into opportunities.
Urvashi Guha and Soumitra Sen from Ideators and Wisdom — seekers of Storytellers, addressed the audience on a historical deep-dive into brands, behavioural changes and triple bottomline, a contradictory theory on CSR activities.
There were workshops on gamification in the communication domain, crisis communication, digital business transformation and sonic branding.
Pathik Nanavati, the gamification head at Zee5, shared inputs on how Zee5 is working towards gamification by integrating different platforms with live shows and online formats.
Ajit Varma, CEO, Brandmusiq, and Merlin D’Souza, Music Producer, gave students an outline of the niche segment of branding via music.
Jose Leon, President-Indigo Consulting, Publicis Group, focused on how human behaviour is being shaped by technology, data and creativity.
The crisis communication workshop was held by Dheeman Vaidya, Director-Public Relations and Communications, Medtronic India.
There was a panel discussion on ‘Evolution of the media and communication industry, and the way ahead’ and the panelists were Bobby Pawar, Chairman and Chief Creative Officer of the Havas Group; Abhishek Mahapatra, Vice President - Head of Communications, Corporate Affairs and CSR at Nissan India; and Varun Duggirala, Co-founder and content chief, The Glitch.
(BusinessLine on Campus is the online media partner of COMVISAGE 2018.)