You started at a time when the internet industry was going through a very tough time.

Our company has made many mistakes: Harish Bahl

Business Standard

For three years now, global CEOs, in survey after survey, have said that dealing with change was their top-ranking challenge. In 2012, they picked a new challenge&mdash;complexity. And it&rsquo;s easy to see why.

A platform for next-gen business

In his recent blog for the Harvard Business Review, Gary Hawkins, CEO, Hawkins Strategic, a US-based consultancy focused on gathering, understanding, and using detailed customer data in retail, says big data has the potential to kill all but the biggest retailers.

Challenges in mining big data: Gary Hawkins

The Mera Number Kab Aayega TVC for Pepsi is still as relevant today as it was back in 2001, when we did it. It&rsquo;s plaintive, irrepressible and very Indian. In fact, I heard somebody use it at the PVR multiplex last night when we were in the queue, trying to get tickets for Barfi. It&rsquo;s also my favourite, because unlike other popular lines I&rsquo;ve written, &lsquo;Nothing Official About It&rsquo;, &lsquo;Yeh Dil Maange More&rsquo;, &lsquo;Oye Bubbly&rsquo;, and &lsquo;Zor Ka Jhatka, Dheere Se Lagey&rsquo; and &lsquo;Darr Ke Aagay Jeet Hai&rsquo;, this is actually a negative line. &lsquo;Mera Number Kab Ayega&rsquo; is actually the slug line for a promo, which is about winning money if the number under your Pepsi crown cap gets picked out in a lottery. In the ads (there were 10 of them) Cyrus (Broacha)&rsquo;s number never comes while everybody else&rsquo;s does. We showed the main protagonist losing every week.

'The TVC had a gorgeous underdog quality with no big celebrities'

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The top 10 business bestsellers

    The second publication of the founders of this company was nicknamed the Yellow Bible. Name them and their company which is now owned by BBC.

The Strategist Quiz (#273)

Boeing&rsquo;s Dreamliner is here and the hard-sell has begun. Newspaper readers were in for a surprise last week when they saw prominent ads released by national carrier Air India inviting corporate executives to consider flying the airline since the Dreamliner was now part of its fleet.

Maharajah sells a dream

Bengal Leads &ndash; at least in a promotional campaign starring the ultimate dream merchant, Shah Rukh Khan. The video has all the trappings of a make-believe Bollywood masala movie &ndash; stunning visuals of the hills in North Bengal, the Sunderban forests and the Bay of Bengal and a soulful rendition of Rabindranath Tagore&rsquo;s &ldquo;Banglar mati, Banglar jal (Bengal&rsquo;s soil, Bengal&rsquo;s water) by Bollywood singer Shaan. In the midst of it all, King Khan&rsquo;s dialogue delivery is immaculate: &ldquo;There is something special about Bengal&rdquo;.

Brand Bengal seeks to ride piggyback on Shah Rukh

Hero MotoCorp, the world&rsquo;s largest two-wheeler producer, has completed its rebranding exercise, pulling out the Honda name from its entire product range, two years ahead of the agreed deadline.

Teething troubles for Hero rebranding

Even as sales have moderated sharply in the world&rsquo;s second largest motorcycle market, demand for scooters has grown in strong double digits between April and August this financial year. The robust growth rates the segment has posted over the last five years have evoked renewed interest among two-wheeler manufacturers who are introducing new products to tap into the category.

Yamaha woos women power

Colors is playing on the theme alag che (it&rsquo;s different) for its marquee reality show - Bigg Boss 6. The channel is spending over Rs 10 crore on marketing the property. &ldquo;All our communication will underline the statement that we have introduced newer elements and it is a family show,&rdquo; Colors marketing head Rajesh Iyer said.

Colors' big marketing push to Bigg Boss 6

The London Grand Prix ended in a photo-finish while the women's GP at Ankara also had an exciting end. Fabiano Caruana leads after the first half of the Sao Paolo-Bilbao Masters. At Ankara, Koneru Humpy logged wins in the last two rounds to overtake Anna Muzychuk who had two draws in her last two games.

Chess (#1021)

Few knew of Weekly Blitz until it broke the Hina Rabbani-Bilawal Bhutto &ldquo;affair&rdquo;.

Tabloid tittle tattle 

Asnow leopard (Panthera uncia), the elusive large cat which lives in the snow-bound ranges of the upper Himalayas, has finally been sighted in Uttarakhand. A specimen of this endangered species was caught on a camera trap for the first time on April 10, 2011, and again in June this year. (A &ldquo;camera trap&rdquo; is a camera placed in the wild, especially in areas that wild animals are known to frequent. These are activated by light or motion and are now widely used in animal census.

Predators in the snow

Vaishali Dinakaran meets Leena Gade &mdash; the only female race engineer to win the 24 Hours of Le Mans, twice.

Lady reneGade

The name can be split into two. The &lsquo;Formula&rsquo; refers to the rules and regulations that bind the sport, while the &lsquo;1&rsquo; denotes that it is the supreme level of motorsport &mdash; the highest echelon, if you will.

F1: A brief history

I am planning on purchasing my first car and have shortlisted the Maruti Suzuki WagonR Duo and the Chevrolet Spark LT LPG. The car will be used for everyday commuting in the city and also for weekend outings (anywhere between 300 and 500 km).

First choice

Delhi has a sizeable Afghan community, both long-time residents and visitors who come seeking medical help. Shivam Saini gives a snapshot of the small but thriving economy that has grown to service them.

Afghan business

If Raigunj MP Deepa Dasmunsi is seen as the most prominent Congress leader in West Bengal today, it is not because she has been anointed so by the Congress high command. Rather, it is because Deepa is the only one in the party who has riled Mamata Banerjee so much that the Trinamool Congress chief and West Bengal chief minister has lately been going out of her way to snub her.

Is Didi's arch rival

Understanding one&rsquo;s parents might be as difficult as fathoming the cosmos, but it&rsquo;s something most of us try to do, in one way or another. Doing this through the lens of a camera for a documentary film, as a number of children of famous parents have in works like My Architect, by the son of Louis Kahn; William Kunstler: Disturbing the Universe, by the radical lawyer&rsquo;s two daughters; and The Man Nobody Knew: In Search of My Father, CIA Spymaster William Colby, by Carl Colby, can be an effective, if grandiose method. It allows the film maker to use the tried-and-true tools of the profession while also making a very public statement.

Sons and Fathers

The most powerful words in any language are &ldquo;Let me tell you a story&rdquo;. No wonder some of advertising&rsquo;s greats, from David Ogilvy and Leo Burnett onwards, have been great story-tellers. As the legend goes, when Ogilvy was on his way to the shoot of the first Hathaway Shirt ad, he picked up a few props which could add a story element to an otherwise unremarkable fashion shoot. And one of those props was, of course, the famous black eye-patch. In an era when dashing veterans from World War II occasionally wore eye-patches, it immediately created a mythology around the elegant silver-haired male model with the expensive lifestyle: Who was he? What was his story? What was the mysterious secret of his past? These things were never explicitly revealed over the next fifteen years that the Hathaway campaign ran, unchanged.

'Let me tell you  A story'

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