At last, an answer to the chicken and egg riddle !

“Venky’s solves the riddle. Venky’s chicken came before Venky’s eggs,” I said with a laugh. “We will use that”, said my friend Girish and thus was born a classroom ad campaign. But first things first. I and Girish were students of Copywriting (the art of writing advertisements) along with seven others in the Advertising Agencies Association of India (AAAI). The nine of us were divided into two groups and given the momentous task of coming up with an ad-campaign to sell branded eggs. Girish, me, Pravina, Sarabjeet and Vernon constituted one team while Rajashree, Vivek, Sunil and Melroy constituted the other team. All of us of course dreamt of emulating the feats of legendary copywriters like David Ogilvy and the the other bright stars in the advertising firmament. The immediate business was of course to create the ad-campaign. Girish loved what I had purely meant to be a joke and since he was the accepted leader of our group we went about creating the campaign. To the uninitiated Venky’s was the abbreviation for Venkateshwara Hatcheries. Venky’s had first launched branded chicken and now we decided in our infinite wisdom that they were going to be the pioneers in branded eggs as well. If I remember correctly, we zeroed in on a hoarding campaign. The Venky solves the riddle was to be a teaser unveiled on hoardings. I honestly don’t remember after all these years as to what went into the rest of our campaign. Both teams of course had to make a presentation on D-Day before securing a certificate. The judge was a senior representative of one of the well known Indian advertising agencies. He agreed that we had an “interesting” teaser but plumped for the campaign created by the other team. They focused on a campaign which wanted to know whether consumers were buying eggs blindfold. We were of course disappointed but took the decision in good grace. I also personally brightened up for a different reason. True , we had lost out in the eyes of the judge. But we had made the most coherent attempt to answer the Chicken and Egg Riddle. Yes, Venky’s eggs came after Venky's chicken.