The age we live in is digital where almost everything is within the tips of your fingers from news to notes and whatnot, we even get our food online. But it was not so when I was a kid. Since childhood, I was curious about things I found intriguing and thought about it constantly until I find something more interesting. Today, when I see around me all I see is people doing everything their mobile phones. I remember my childhood and of the many things which may have seemed impossible then were not only possible now but I was also a part of it. Now I truly realize all you need to change the world is an Idea (Ek !DEA jo Badal de Aap ki Duniya!).
There was a campaign launched by Idea ‘Use Mobiles Save Paper’ when I was a kid. I remember the advertisement where Abhishek Bachchan was the last standing tree in a grove. Which started to bloom Cell-phones with an idea in all of them to save trees! It was enough to get me started to think about it. Later in the advertisement, we can see people waiting for “Newspapers” to arrive on their phones and whatnot, the most interesting use case for me was people paying using their mobile phones. As a kid, I somewhat knew that money was important and that you should have it so I started thinking if this could really happen people could cheat on each other so easily as there would be no proof of anything whatsoever. Based on my knowledge I concluded to myself that advertisements are misleading and this could never happen. There are a lot of smart people out there and they must have already thought about it so they would never let something like this happen. But I was a kid then and now I realize how important Ideas are! When I was first introduced to payment through mobiles I was shocked. (Because I thought I was smart as a kid and could not be wrong) I realized that all those smart people out there instead of thinking that there is a flaw the idea and that they should discard it could also be working on removing those flaws and making that idea a success. That was a real moment for realization for me.
Just before joining FMS, I was working with a fitness start-up called FitArt based in Nagpur. I was handling all the marketing campaigns for FitArt. Throughout the year I initiated various digital marketing and physical campaigns to promote FitArt. But I always wanted to link fitness to fun, so I had undertaken an ambitious task to organize a Mixed Box Cricket Tournament within 7 days. After convincing my bosses for this event. I, first of all, looked at the optimum locations in Nagpur and checked for the availability of dates. After finalizing the venue, I accelerated the promotion of the event. We ran a small but effective campaign for the cricket tournament and the response which we got was truly overwhelming, in fact, we had to increase the scale of the tournament in response. Then I put all the efforts into giving these participants a memorable experience. We created teams containing both male and female members of various age groups, named these teams, created all the rule sheets and also took care of the music, snacks and fun events for the viewers who had come to cheer their favorite teams. And finally, we managed to put up a great event, even heavy rainfall in the middle of the cricket match could not stop the cricket teams and us to walk away from such a fun experience. Every player present at the tournament had a very good time and many requests just flooded over our inbox for the second season of FitArt Premier League aka The Mixed Box Cricket Tournament.
Organizing this event helped me know more about the ground realities in handling all the logistics and managing crowd of different demographics.