The Effie Awards are a time for the advertising fraternity to come together and applaud ‘excellence in effective advertising’. Last month, apart from recognising the best work in the year gone by, the annual gathering announced a new initiative: the formation of a shadow committee. “We have realised that the present Ad Club Committee is not the future of the advertising world,” the Advertising Council said in a surprising admission-cum-announcement. “A newly formed Young Turks committee will act as a link to the future.” Clearly, the Indian ad industry is no longer what it used to be.

In the past few years, the ad arena has undergone a sea change. The means of communication have expanded and multiplied. It is new distribution channels, and additional product and consumer categories that have forced this change.

In this hyper-productive market, a new product is launched almost every day. Retail, real estate and IT are rockets the consumer has become accustomed to riding. The brand awareness level of fairness creams among male consumers in the age group of 25-30 years is 43 per cent. It matches the bracket their spending power falls into. Sugar-free substitutes and body washes are now common household products, not niche categories.

This change and rise in awareness among consumers is witnessed across all socio-economic strata, regions and towns. “It’s evident that consumers are evolving fast,” says Nakul Chopra, CEO and managing director of Ambience Publicis. “As a result, they have started dictating market trends. To start with, the industry needs to achieve a level where it can reach out to future consumers before they demand a new idea to match their lifestyles. This way, the advertising industry can once again be the custodian of the brand.”

The Indian advertising sector has had a flat growth rate of 10-12 per cent per annum in the past two years. According to AdEx India, a division of TAM Media Research, ad spend was Rs 16,300 crore as compared to the previous year’s Rs13,200 crore. It’s a race that everyone runs. If the consumer is sprinting, media and technology follow at a close dash.

Agencies also have to rethink their role. “In today’s evolving markets, agencies must realise that they are not here to tell consumers what they must consume; instead, they are here to keep consumers interested in a particular brand by breaking through the clutter with interesting concepts,” says S. Shanta Kumar, managing director at Saatchi & Saatchi.