The weekend gone by saw frenetic activity in the pristine hill city resort of Aamby Valley. History was being made. Over 500 communications professionals representing over 170 organisations had made this resort their home for two days. Arguably the largest gathering of PR professionals living in one campus anywhere in the world.
With the fifth edition five objectives were met.
A real solid gathering was taking place where senior and younger practitioners were meeting to get to know each other, inspire one another and make meaningful conversations in a relaxed setting.
Five international leaders had chosen to spend a weekend in India sharing insights and watching first-hand the evolution of a market that has become important to them. Their talks, their energy and their interest in India was there for all to see.
A viable conference was being put together with an eye for detail and superb consistency with all the right ingredients of exchange, food, music and lodging put together. Focus on young professionals, on the chief reputation officer and on modern technology advance were all in the mix.
PRAXIS was able to host an awards night – again a unique system with utmost transparency and no conflict of interest about which I will write in a subsequent column. While an awards as independent as Fulcrum has been a long-felt need the cat was not being belled for a long time.
Lastly, PRAXIS has become an institution because of some of the policies that were incorporated early on including non-repetition of speakers among other things.
Some of the takeaways from the summit were –
- Millennials are clearly going to be the focus of brands and marketers. Therefore, PR professionals will need to plan campaigns and programmes with this group in mind.
- Creativity will remain the cornerstone of all communications. The only differentiator between communications professionals will be creativity in the way content is created, shared and evaluated.
- Regional media is a force to reckon with and brands will need to embrace the power of the regional media to build strong reputation in new frontiers.
- Artificial intelligence, augmented reality, virtual reality will increasingly become part of the day to day life in relation to brand marketing.
- Start-ups have huge business potential for communications firms and are looking at creating long term value with reliable partners.
All in all, the summit was a great melting pot of known and unknown faces. The benchmark has been set, expectations have risen. As a three-member team the pressure is on us to build another great summit in 2017. The dates have been frozen. September 15 and 16 it is. In a few weeks we will finalise and announce the venue.
He is also the Founding Dean of the School of Communications & Reputation (SCoRe).
He can be reached at @amithpr on twitter.
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