Goafest 2023: Themed 'Future of Creativity', India's largest A&M festival kicks off today

The three-day advertising and marketing symposium of India, Goafest 2023 will begin today at Grand Hyatt, Bambolim, Goa.

The 16th edition of the festival will see clients, marketers, agencies, etc. come together to delve deeper into the nitty gritty of how technology, first-party data building, and storytelling will shape up creativity in the years ahead.

Themed ‘Future of Creativity’, the ad fest will see over 60 global and Indian speakers and performers coming together for 20 interactive sessions and 11 masterclasses. Besides this, celebrities from Indian Sports and Bollywood like Harbhajan Singh, Tabu and Rana Daggubati will also be present at the Goafest this year.

While the days will be a witness to various knowledge seminars and masterclasses, the evenings shall see the creative excellence being honoured at The Abby One Show Awards.

What is new about this year’s Goafest?

In the views of Goafest’s Organising Committee members, this year’s ad fest will see the young leaders of the industry coming to the front and sharing their views and deductions. In fact, the Goafest 2023 will also be a host to many firsts, such as Advertising Rocks, Goacast (Goafest’s Podcast), and The Ad Asia Seoul roadshow, they said.

Moreover, a lot more marketers and agencies will be present at the fest this time around, unlike previous years, as per the committee who has received the largest list of speakers on stage as well as the highest number of masterclasses from across systems- clients, marketers, experts, international thought leaders, etc. and with people from fields such as sports, entertainment, content-making, etc. 

“We also have people representing and sharing insights from multiple facets such as that of the influencer ecosystem (ASCI), advertising learnings (IAA) and experts speaking about how the start-up ecosystem is shaping up, clients talking about the marketing funnel and how it reflects upon many of the brand’s business etc,” the committee stated.

What’s in store in Goafest 2023’s agenda and speakers line-up

Global advertising personalities such as Nick Law, Global Creative Chairperson, Accenture Song and Ed Pank, Managing Director, WARC APAC will also address the audiences at the industry symposium.

The panel members for this year’s fest include Hemant Malik of ITC Foods, Rohit Kapoor of Swiggy, Prabha Narasimhan of Colgate-Palmolive, Chandan Mukherji of Nestle India, Priyanka Gill of Good Glamm Group, Ravi Santanam of HDFC and Vipul Prakash of MakeMyTrip.

On the other hand, the sessions will see industry leaders such as Rajan Anandan of Sequoia Capital,  Sam Balsara of Madison, Josy Paul of BBDO, Rohit Ohri of FCB, Anusha Shetty of Grey, Dheeraj Sinha of Leo Burnett, Vikram Sakuja of Madison, Subhash Kamath, Anupriya Acharya of Publicis, Tarun Katyal of Coto, Lata Venkatesh of CNBC TV18, T Gangadhar of Quotient, Aditi Mishra of Lodestar UM, Amin Lakhani of Mindshare, Mohit Joshi of Havas Media, Naveen Khemka of Essence Mediacom, Geet Lulla of Comscore, Pankaj Krishna of Chrome DM and Salil Kumar of ITGD sharing their insights.

Moreover, special sessions would also be curated by ASCI on Creator Calling Creator, by the IAA on Voice of Change on Gender Bias and Ad Asia 2023 Seoul Roadshow by AFAA.

To ensure that the fun mode stays on along with the learnings at the ad fest, singers such as Kanika Kapoor, Papon, Divya Kumar and Asees Kaur and digital creator and stand-up comic Aiyoo Shraddha would also be performing at Goafest in addition to DJs such as Suketu, Savio and DJ AJ.

How is The Advertising Club giving its best at The Abby One Show Awards

Since this is the second year of the partnership between The Advertising Club and The One Show, the Awards Governing Council has made it a point to make the awards more relevant by aiming to represent “today” and therefore an increased focus is on the contemporary rather than the past.

As an outcome of the same, the industry accolade, which earlier enlisted seven broad categories under Creative, has now undergone a change not only in terms of the nomenclature but also the essence and definition - owing to the changing times and in order to be more contemporary.

This time around, TAC has revised the Print Category to Still for both Print and Digital; TV category to Audio Visual- TV, Cinema, Digital, and OTT which is further divided into two subcategories- less than one minute and more than one minute; Radio Category to Audio to include Podcasting and other new age audio mediums.

While the Publisher and Media Abby will be given away on Day 1 of Goafest; Broadcaster, Public Relations, Design, Direct and Technology, and Digital and Mobile Abby will be announced on Day 2 and the remaining- Video Craft, Audio, Branded Content and Entertainment, Green Award, Brand Activation and Promotion, Diversity, Equality and Inclusion, Out of Home (Ambient Media), Still Print, Still Digital, Audio-Visual TV, Cinema, Digital, OTT (Below 1 min duration), Audio-Visual TV, Cinema, Digital, OTT (1 min and above), Young Abby Awards, Young Maverick, Red Abby and Integrated Abby on Day 3.

It is to be noted that The Young Maverick is the newest addition to The Abby One Show Awards which solely aims to recognise the work and the people who are either 30 years of age or under, so as to bring the spotlight to the work of “unsung” heroes or the youth.

In terms of the entries for this year’s awards, TAC shared that while the number of entries received from the creative agencies last year was 2007, this year’s tally stands at 2282 in addition to the media agencies which sent 1014 entries last year, as opposed to this year’s 1019 entries, taking the number of total entries to 3301 this year, up from last year’s 3021 entries.

As per TAC, the agency participation has also increased on a YoY basis as 63 media agencies have participated in The Abby One Show Awards 2023 as opposed to 54 last year. Similarly, the number of creative agencies participating in the awards has also gone up from 142 to 181 this year.

In fact, some of the prominent agencies which earlier refrained from participating in the awards, such as Mullen Lowe Lintas, Wunderman Thompson and McCann Worldgroup, have returned to the industry accolade with 15, 16 and 57 entries, respectively.

Building on the industry narrative of any award being as good as its jury, Mandie van der Merwe, Nick Law, Wesley ter Haar, Prajato Guha Thakurta, Avinash Pandey, Valerie Pinto, Ahmed Aftab Naqvi, Ashwini Deshpande, Emmanuel Upputuru, Sabyasachi Mitter, Bobby Pawar, P G Aditiya, Guneet Monga, Mangesh Rane, Russell Barrett, Pallavi Chakravarti and Rajdeepak Das have donned the hats of jury members for this year’s awards.

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