Print Summit 2020: Must attend sessions

This is my first Print Summit, attended by more than 800 delegates including industry VIPs, print professionals and students. As a BMPA official said to me during the breakfast at the open air garden at the NCPA in Nariman Point, “It is an engaging, full-day conference with top level international speakers and leaders of the printing industry in attendance. Also win amazing raffle draws."

The session I am most excited about is the panel discussion on Horizontal Growth, Vertical Results — The Art of Enabling Success through Delegation with industry stalwarts, which will be moderated by BMPA's Iqbal Kherodawala.

The panellists are: Manish Sharma who is the cofounder of Printo, India’s largest retail print chain. With 36 stores in six cities, Printo has pioneered a new category in retail as well as the print industry. The Printo Group also owns Canvera, India’s largest premium album brand, and Inkmonk, a leading online print provider.

Then there is Naresh Kumar Dasari, who is the managing director at Macro Media Digital Imaging, which is in the super wide format digital business since 1999 and currently operates eight production facilities across Hyderabad, Mumabi, Gurugram, Kolkata, Chennai, Bengaluru, Kochi and Vizag.

Then there is Akshay Kanoria, who graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 2014 with BSc in Economics and a BA in International Studies. Since then he has been involved in TCPL Packaging, which is majority owned by the Kanoria family. He started out at the family business by managing the expansion of TCPL's Guwahati plant, and under his father, TCPL MD Saket Kanoria's guidance, Akshay is presently involved in sales and marketing, corporate strategy and operations, with special focus on the sheetfed offset vertical of the business.

And finally, there is Pragnyat Lalwani who is the co-founder of Seshaasai Business Forms which has grown over the past 26 years from being a data driven print organisation to a leader in the customer communication space with solutions spread across print, email, web and mobile.

My five must-attend sessions

• Print Summit's first speaker is Josy Paul who started BBDO India from the backseat of his car in 2008. In 2016, BBDO was named Creative Agency Head of The Year by the IAA (Indian Advertising Association). Campaign Magazine awarded him Creative Person of the Year for India and South Asia in 2012 and 2015 and 2016. Last month, they won the prestigious White Pencil at the D&AD Social Impact awards. Josy and his team also won the Grand Prix at AdFest, Spikes Asia, and APAC Effies and in Indian award shows. He was born during an earthquake and has a permanent tremor. He lives by the mantra, “Think like the navy, deliver like the pirates.”
• Keynote address about business in the next decade by D Shivakumar, group executive president, Aditya Birla Group
• Vivek Bhargava, the CEO of DAN Performance Group will talk about digital as a multiplier to the print industry.
• Worried about losing money to bad debts? Hear Kaushal Sampat explain using data and AI to avoid customer bad debts; and how the low data rate can be a game changer for our industry.
• Renowned international life coach Gaur Gopal Das, who has said, “No one in this world is perfect. And if we reject people all the time simply because they make mistakes we will be left with only one person in our life, ourselves. And are we perfect? Do we not make mistakes?" His viral motivational videos have had over 500 million views. Now read these statistics: 4.3 million followers on Facebook, 1.2 million on Instagram and 2.2 million subscribers on Youtube.