Goafest: Social Street bags Creative Agency of the Year
Early Man Film wins Grand Prix for Reforest India ad film
Newer advertising agencies such as Social Street, Medulla and Dentsu Webchutney took advantage of industry leaders giving Goafest a miss this year and went home with an impressive haul of metals.
The 13th edition of the three-day advertising and marketing festival ended on Saturday. This was also the 50th year of the Abby Awards.
Social Street, started by adman Pratap Bose three years ago, won the coveted Creative Agency of the Year with a metals tally — industry parlance for awards — of 17 (three gold, seven silver and seven bronze), and a score of 94.
A gold fetches eight points, silver six and bronze four.
Early Man Film bagged the only Grand Prix. On Friday, it had won five golds in the video craft category — three for Reforest India and two for MTV — with a score of 92 points. The Grand Prix gave it 12 more points.
Ajay Kakkar, chairman of the Awards Governing Council (AGC), said the Grand Prix was reserved for “the best of the best”.
FCBIndia Group, led by Rohit Ohri, was second in the list of the Creative Agency of the Year, with eight metals. It scored 38 points. Medulla WYP also scored 38, but had six metals.
Dentsu Webchutney came fourth, with four metals. Its score was 22.
Goafest is organised jointly by The Advertising Club and the Advertising Agencies Association of India. The Abby Awards are the property of the former.
“There were a number of things that we set out to do this year. We rationalised categories since the broad theme in advertising today is convergence. We brought on board master jurors, 12 of the top creative people in the business. They judged the Creative Abbies in rounds one and two,” said Vikram Sakhuja, president, The Advertising Club.
The list of jurors included famous personalities from the industry such as Prasoon Joshi, Agnello Dias, Santosh Padhi, Ameer Jaleel, Arun Iyer, K V Sridhar, Bobby Pawar and Raj Deepak Das.
In the first round, entries are shortlisted. They are put up on The Advertising Club website for vetting and for people to call out work that is not genuine. The winners are chosen in the final round. An auditor checks all the entries and maintains transparency at all stages. This year, the auditor was KPMG.
There were 3,033 entries this year, down from 4,884 last year. The number of organisations taking part this year (255) was also less than last year (348).
One reason for this was lower budgets for advertising, said Sakhuja. For instance, for the Media Abby Awards, the number of entries this year was 660, down from last year’s 1,100. “Many agencies did not have great work to show,” he added.
There were some notable absentees this year such as JWT, Taproot, Publicis Worldwide, and McCann, and also the regular missing ones, Ogilvy & Mather, Leo Burnett, MullenLowe Lintas and Creativeland Asia.