Adfilms is all chills, thrills & fun in minutes

The 'Night of the Adeaters' is a unique advertising festival started by Frenchman Jean Marie Boursicot, a 52-year old, who has taken his passion for adfilms seriously and collected over 750,000 clips of ads from all over the world.

He's showed this collection off in various cities around the world, like Dubai, Sidney, Brussels, Geneva and Milan. This was started in 1981 and has grown into one of the most interesting festivals.

Jean Marie Boursicot told CNBC-TV18, "When I discovered that advertising agencies never conserve their work, I decided to have my own company with my little collection. Now, ofcourse, it's grown huge because we have more than 750,000 films from all over the world."

That is the reason for the existence of his company, Cinematheque. But the cost of preservation and restoration proved to be expensive on his pockets, so, this unique adfilm festival was born in France.

Now, this collection travels across 160 cities in countries like China, Japan, Mexico and Russia. Mumbai got a glipmse of those celebrated adfilms only recently and ad buffs, who can do without the serials but not the ads, shouldn't miss an opportunity to view these clips.

Boursicot says, "The Night of the Ad Eaters is an annual rendezvous and people are coming every year to see the collection. I'm hopeful of organising this festival again next year, not only in Mumbai but in 6-7 other Indian cities and with a real duration of seven hours of ads."

The event showed some 200 adfilms and the audience lapped it all up. Some in the adworld were also impressed. Veteran adman Prahlad Kakkar says, "I think it's a glorious occupation because ads are actually the reflection of a society in transition. So, if you ever want to find out what India is like at this particular time and moment, all you have to do is look at the 100 most successful ads, not necessarily the best ads."

An Italian viewer at the festival, Antonio Pasano sums it up, "In India you have a lot of channels with movies and lot of other advertisements. These channels should have advertisements with some movies around it!"

To know more about the Adeaters festival:
http://www.adeater.com/html/passion.htm

Written for www.moneycontrol.com