anil.org.in

Kochi is a city of billboards. You can see them as soon as you enter the city from either side. Majority of those billboards are rented out by real estate biz (both big and small). The second position (way below the first one) is taken by jewellers. The third is cell phone brands and the remaining miniscule percentage is shared by the rest. That used to be the billboards share distribution in the city. But this time when I visited Kochi (my first visit in this year), I noticed one things as soon as I entered the by-pass: Many billboards are empty!

Billboards of Recession

Collage of some photographs of empty billboards I took. Follow this link to my Picasa album to see them separately

I am not into media selling business and I know nothing about it; this caught my attention accidentally. But this interested me very much because this is a direct indication of the fact that advertisers stopped spending possibly due to budget cut. To me this looked as a direct measure of the recession our economy has been passing through. A friend of mine in the advertisement industry told me a few weeks ago that promotional budget is what businesses would cut doen when there is cash crunch. This point is substantiated by what I saw there.

Billboards must be cheaper now. Those who want to have their message displayed in the city and think that still it is a good time, this is the opportunity you have been waiting for. I am sure that other cities too have empty billboards reading “recession” on them.

Another interesting observation is that, at some key locations such as Marine Drive, small-time guys have already rented couple of prominent billboards. May be, people started taking advantage of the situation.

[This is one chain mail I received from a friend of mine. I don't know who the original author is. I found it worth posting here.]

Once upon a time, the government had a vast scrap yard in the middle of a desert. Parliament said, “Someone may steal from it at night.”

So they created a night watchman position and hired a person for the job. Then Parliament said, “How does the watchman do his job without instructions?” So they created a planning department and hired two people, one person to write the instructions, and one person to do time studies.

Then Parliament said, “How will we know the night watchman is doing the tasks correctly?” So they created a Quality Control department and hired two people. One to do the studies and one to write the reports.

Then Parliament said, “How are these people going to get paid?” So they created the following positions, a time keeper, and a payroll officer, then hired two people.

Then Parliament said, “Who will be accountable for all of these people?” So they created an administrative section and hired three people, an Administrative Officer, Assistant Administrative Officer, and a Legal Secretary.

Then Parliament said, “We have had this command in operation for one year and we are $18,000 over budget, we must cutback overall cost.”

So they laid off the night watchman.