Wednesday, February 13, 2008

An Ad can change your business

In today’s world of marketing, advertisement is an effective tool to sell your products to the masses.
Baba Umar
‘You can tell the ideals of an area by its advertisements’, says Norman Douglas, and in case of Kashmir valley these ideals seem to be growing exponentially. A number of colourful and eye pleasing hoardings are quite visible on the Srinagar roads. Its marked change and one that goes to show that people are no longer going to buy your items unless and until they don’t know it before hand.

From the last two years advertisement techniques have changed here. Since the market in Kashmir is considerable growing so much so that many feel the ads are changing from being banal to trendy. The business intellect is basically on rise in the valley; people prefer to put in their money in small scale industries, manufacturing units, educational sectors and share markets,” says Parvaiz Ahmed, an Ad maker. “And we can’t sideline the competition from all forces—that are there to make much through the advertisements. He says the advertisement techniques have not only advanced but have become cheap too for the masses.“Today even small level businessmen are expanding their market by simply putting their products on advertisement hoardings.”
On Srinagar roads one could see the big fiber made uni-pole ads that dot the city and the adjacent areas, and, even the small ad-hangers (30’x40’) have come up to attract the potential buyers. There are so many square-shaped boards that read ‘Space available here’ followed by the contacts of the service provider.
And this was not the case in the past many acknowledge.“It is basically a sign of the time - a natural reaction to the environment where communication is the key and here ads play effective role,” says Hayat Ahmad, Managing Director, Helpline Advertising Service (HAS).
“And it’s interesting to see it happening here in such a big way.”HAS is the contract holder of these uni-pole hoardings and have installed close to one hundred of such hoardings in the city. Ahmad says the demand is on the rise and the company is planning to come out with Light Emitting Diode (LED) and Liquid Crystal Display (LCD) hoardings in the next month.
“We have already installed one LCD hoarding at the Polo View and three such hoardings are also with the Tourist Reception Centre (TRC), and they will be used in the bus stands and other resting places in the city.”
Earlier in the ad creation sector, there used to be a dearth of professionalism particularity in the making of Fibre Uni-poles ads, which meant that considerable chunk of money, was going outside for designing such ads. However the trend has changed. These ad-hoardings are prepared in the valley and no outside manpower is used, claims the HAS official.
“Ad makers early had dearth of technical support and perfection,” says Ahmad. “But now everything has changed, we are no more dependent on the outside machinery or labour.” Even the onlookers of these hoardings react with the same tone.
“I could see graphics, colors and special treatment given to ads in these hoardings,” says Fazal Malik. “And that’s quite a revelation.”

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