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Companies use all forms of media to advertise their products and services. advertising began simply as a way of telling people about a product, but it is now much more sophisticated. It is used to present the image of a company in a certain way and also to target a particular audience that the company feels it can attract. In this way, the company associates itself with a certain lifestyle. Advertising is a huge business, with large companies investing huge sums of money in anything from sports sponsorship to putting their logo on the side of a milk carton.

Companies use advertisements as part of a marketing program to increase sales of their products and services. Advertising plays a different role at different stages of the marketing process -- helping to raise awareness of a product or service, generating leads for a sales force or selling directly. Companies with retail outlets use advertising to make consumers aware of product availability and increase sales through the outlets.

Awareness

Companies use advertising to make customers and prospects aware of the features and benefits of their products. If customers are not aware of your product, they will not consider it when they next make a purchasing decision for the type of product you offer. Advertising puts your product into the consumer’s set of choices.

Brand Preference

Advertising can build a preference for your product over competitors’ offerings. Your advertising messages must reflect the information that customers feel is important when choosing a product. It must also stress the quality of your product. By advertising regularly, you can reinforce the brand messages so that your product becomes first choice when the consumer next makes a purchase.

Direct Sales

Use direct response advertising to sell products directly to customers. The advertisement includes details of the product and its price together with a telephone number or website address where customers can order the product.

Retail Development

Advertising details of retailers or distributors that stock your products builds sales by driving traffic to the outlets. The advertisements can provide information on retail outlets or promote special offers available at those outlets. This type of advertising can also help you promote your products to distributors and retailers.

Lead Generation

If you market products and services through a sales force, you can use advertisements to generate leads for the team to follow up. Include a response mechanism in the advertisement such as a reply coupon, telephone number or email address so that customers can register their details in return for an incentive offer. Examples of incentives include free copies of special reports for business customers or gifts for consumers.

Reputation

When a prospect is selecting a supplier for a major purchase, company reputation is an important factor in the decision. Use advertising to build a positive perception of your company. Reputation or corporate advertising communicates messages about factors such as your company’s achievements, financial stability, market success and innovation record.

I am in Std. XII (Humanities) with an interest in history. What are the possible career options in the field of history? I am also interested in advertising and am confused between the two. Please help.

History graduates work in a wide variety of areas, e.g., business, law, politics, social service, and education. These areas may not be directly related to history, but students of history develop valuable skills in research, analysis, and oral and written communication and use this training to work in an environment suitable and use this training to work in an environment suitable for their personalities and interests.

Knowledge of history is also an asset in journalism. Newspapers and journals often give assignments to historians for the preparation of background material to enlighten the public on the historical importance of an event. History is very popular choice for various competitive examinations at state and central level like the civil services.

Advertising is a glamorous, fast-paced, high profile but serious business. An advertising agency utilizes professionals with a wide variety of talents and skills to develop memorable advertisements that promote sales for the client company. It can be a satisfying career for those who enjoy variety, excitement, creative challenges, and competition.

Though advertising offers opportunities to meet high profile people, to see their work in print, and has many perks, it is hard work and the pace is frantic. The deadlines are firm and the field is very stressful. Within the limited time, you need to show creativity and results. It’s a tightrope-walk on an everyday basis.

For a career in advertising, you need to imaginative business-oriented and be able to communicate persuasively, both orally and in writing along with an outgoing personality. On the other hand, history-related careers require proficiency in reading comprehension, writing and speaking, ability to analyse historical data and correct research.

 

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UNESCO has a multimedia archives wing that contains archival evidence of over 70 years of efforts towards international peace and understanding covering the organisation’s wide ranging fields of competence. With the goal of preservation of audiovisual heritage, UNESCO archives launched the project called “Digitizing our shared UNESCO memory” in 2015. This fundraising project was launched with the motive of digitizing UNESCO’s archives dating back to its predecessor, the League of Nations’ International Institute for Intellectual Cooperation.

UNESCO decided to digitize its archives since its physical records had started showing signs of wear and tear due to frequent use. Also, the analogue formats in some of its audiovisual collections dating as far back as the 1940s made it difficult and in some cases impossible to consult. Hence, digitizing the archives will help preserve the original material as also ensure continued access.

With support from the Government of Japan, UNESCO launched a two-year initiative, in partnership with Picture BV, a Netherlands-based company, to set up an onsite laboratory. This lab, installed at the UNESCO headquarters in Paris in February 2018, will function till the end of 2019. The lab will be at the forefront of the digitizing effort of the UNESCO archives.

 

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The Coordinating Council of Audiovisual Archives Associations (CCAAA) plays a key role along with UNESCO in the observation of the day. The CCAAA is an important international organization that works with professional archival organizations around the world for the preservation of audiovisual documents. Currently, eight associations are from the CCAAA. These associations, along with their members, conduct meetings, exhibitions, audiovisual performances and more to mark the day all over the world.

In our country, the National Film Archives of India usually hosts exhibitions for the public to create awareness about the rich heritage of Indian cinema and the efforts taken to preserve film and other audiovisual documents.

 

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At the term suggests, audiovisual is any form of electric media possessing a sound (audio) and a visual component. Films, television programmes and theatre productions are all audiovisual media.

World day for Audiovisual Heritage is celebrated annually on October 27. It is a commemoration of the adoption, in 1980 by the 21st General Conference, of the Recommendation for the Safeguarding and Preservation of Moving Images.

Observed the world over, this day was chosen by UNESCO in 2005 to raise awareness about the significance of preserving audiovisual documents. Audiovisual archives bear testimony to the lives and cultures of people all over the world. They are a valuable source of knowledge, as they reflect the linguistic, social and cultural diversity of communities.

According to UNESCO, this heritage is now endangered because it can be destroyed or irretrievably lost as a result of neglect, decay or technological obsolescence. Thus, through initiatives such as this and the Memory of the World Programme, the work of preservation professionals is encouraged to safeguard audiovisual heritage from technical, political, financial, social and other factors that threaten it.

 

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Paramesh Krishnan Nair, known popularly as P.K. Nair, was an Indian film scholar and archivist. Nair was the founder-director of the NFAI who dedicated his life to archiving films for posterity. He started his journey with the NFAI in 1965 as an assistant curator. He travelled all across India to collect film reels, and created a vibrant collection over the many decades he worked with the NFAI.

Some of his important finds are reels from Dadasaheb Phalke’s Kalia Mardan, and Ardeshir Irani’s Alam Ara, the first Indian talking film.

Nair became the first director of the NFAI in 1982 and developed the framework for its functioning.

Though he got some practical training in branches of film making from film makers of Bombay, particularly Mehboob Khan, Bimal Roy and Hrishikesh Mukherjee, he realised that he did not have the ideal qualities to become a filmmaker himself. His interest lay more in the field of academics.

As advised by Jean Bhownagary of Films Division of India, he appeared for an interview at the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII), was selected and joined the institute in March 1961 in the position of research assistant. While at FTII, he assisted Marie Seton and Professor Satish Bahadur in initiating and conducting the film appreciation classes of FTII. He also conducted early work to establish the film archive set up as a separate wing of FTII. He corresponded with the curators and directors of established film archives in the UK, USA, France, Italy, Poland, Soviet Union and other countries. All of them advised an independent autonomous entity for NFAI and not as a wing of FTII.

Destructive fire and current state of preservation

A huge fire which broke out on January 8, 2003 in the Film and Television Institute of India caused massive destruction in a vault of the NFAI housed on the campus. Nearly, 1,700 nitrate film base prints perished, and 607 films in 5,097 reels were lost in the fire. Among the greatest losses for the Archive were the reels of Dadasaheb Phalke’s films Raja Harishchandra (1913), Lanka Dahan (1917), and Kaliya Mardan (1919).

In March 2019, a report submitted by the Comptroller and Auditor General of India stated that nearly 31,000 reels at the NFAI were reported lost or destroyed.

Recently, the Jayakar Bungalow on the NFAI campus was inaugurated by Prakash Javadekar, Minister of Information and Broadcasting and Environment, Forest and Climate Change. The bungalow will house a digital film library where researchers can access the NFAI’s database.

 

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To preserve, conserve, digitize and restore films and ancillary material, the NFHM was setup by the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting. As of June 2019, the NFHM has completed assessment of the condition of nearly 1.32 lakh film reels and conservation work of the same is underway. These reels will soon be digitized.

The objectives of NFHM include assessing  the film conditions and to ascertain the left over life of films, preventive conservation of 1,32,000 film reels, 2k/4k picture and sound restoration of 1086 landmark feature films and 1152 short films; recording of new picture and sound inter-negatives of each film, digitization of 1160 feature film and 1660 short films, construction of Archival and Preservation facilities with global standards, Training and Capacity building programmes in the field of preservation facilities with global standards, training and capacity building programmes in the field of preservation and film archiving in co-ordination with international agencies. 

The Mission also aims at IT solution for effective implementation of NFHM by creation of comprehensive Web-based end to end IT management solution that will keep track of all aspects of the functioning of the mission.

 

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Preservation of films

The NFAI has 19 film preservation facilities /vaults as per international standards and specifications. The 19 vaults together can store close to two lakhs film reels.

Initially, the film collection was stored on the premises of the Film and Television Institute of India, but was later moved to the NFAI’s new building, which is also Pune, in 1994.

Research and documentation

This section of the NFAI is in charge of tracing, collecting and preserving the heritage of Indian cinema. It contains nearly 1,50,000 still photographs relating to almost every period of Indian cinema. It also contains over 24,000 film posters in various sizes, 14,000 song booklets, 1,00,000 press clippings and old disc records.

The Library

The NFAI library has over 29,000 books on cinema from around the world. It has close to 100 periodicals on cinema published in various languages and nearly 31,000 film scripts received from the Central Board of Film Certification, India.

Most of the old books, periodicals and scripts are digitized. The library is open to the public for research purposes.

 

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For long, films have been a medium of enter. There are so many films made every year that people are left with endless options. Apart from entertaining people, films form an important part of a country’s heritage, throwing light on its culture and progress. To preserve this rich heritage, the National Film Archive of India (NFAI) was set up in 1964 as a media unit of the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Government of India.

About the NFAI

The NFAI was created with the objective of preserving films as art and historical documents.

A member of the International Federation of Film Archives, the NFAI’s three principal objectives are - to trace, acquire and preserve for posterity the heritage of Indian cinema; to classify, document data and undertake research relating to films; and to act as a centre for the dissemination of film culture.

The NFAI has a stock of film reels, video cassettes, DVDs, books, posters, stills, clippings and audio CDs of Indian cinema since the 1910s. With its headquarters in Pune, Maharashtra, it has regional offices in Bengaluru, Kolkata, and Thiruvananthapuram.

The NFAI has several facilities and sections. It has a huge library and organises film screenings periodically for the people at its various centres. In association with the Film and Television Institute of India, Pune, it also conducts courses on film appreciation.

 

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