How Goafest has Evolved

BY IMPACT Staff

Arvind Sharma, founding Chairman of Goafest & President of the Advertising Agencies Association of India (AAAI), writes about the genesis of Goafest and how it acquired its nuances over the years

Venue: AAAI office

Place: Cuffe Parade

It was sometime in December, 2005. The Advertising Agencies Association of India (AAAI)’s executive committee meeting was in progress. The topic under discussion was the AAAI awards. Unexpectedly, a set of fingers rose to point at me and the refrain was: “This year, you will look after the AAAI awards.” The AAAI awards, in those days, competed with two other national advertising awards – The Abbys with their fabulous award ceremonies at Mumbai and CAG, a smaller affair. In a moment of lapsed judgment, I said, “I will, if the committee endorses the idea of doing something new that creates discontinuous value for the industry.” Srinivasan Swamy was the president of AAAI then. These were the words he was waiting to hear. He jumped at the thought. He and I became partners in a new ambition.

We began by calling a meeting of about 40 creative directors. A few suggested the idea of creating a festival of advertising in India. Others unanimously backed the idea. Some suggested Goa as the venue. Others thought that it would be impossible to get many people to come to Goa for three days. We left the meeting without a conclusion on the venue. In our hearts, though, we knew that somehow we had to make the festival happen in Goa.

Jagdip Bakshi and V Shantakumar volunteered to help and also became our partners. Together, we created the festival format of two-and-a-half days spanning a conclave on ‘Day Zero’, seminars on Day 1 & 2 followed by awards each night. The idea of a special village for the world’s first advertising festival on a beach was conceived. For the next four months, four of us committed more than 50% of our time to making the advertising festival in Goa happen. Star TV came on board as our main festival sponsor. Many other media houses also agreed to support us as key sponsors.

We had just enough money to pull off the festival, hopefully. But how would we attract people for three days to Goa? I argued that we had to come up with a marketing idea to pull young people to the festival. The ‘Under 30’s’ scheme was born as a result: Pay Rs 3,500 (if I remember correctly) as delegate fee, get there and after that everything else is on us.

Debates were continuing about the venue. The dominant view at that time was that the festival should move around from city to city. And this was worrying me. Based on years of going to the Cannes Advertising Festival, I knew that a festival is a brand. Every year, it needs to offer something fresh, but consistency is even more important. So I pushed for naming the festival Goafest. That nailed the possibility of the festival venue being moved around every year! Local awards face a unique challenge.

There is a constant underlying emotional tug of war, between jury members’ honest desire to acknowledge great work from their peers and their personal and commercial compulsions of seeing their own work win at the expense of their competitors’. As a result, not many local award shows survive beyond a few years. Goafest has not been totally immune from these tugs resulting in some agencies choosing not to participate in any given year. However, one of the reasons Goafest is in its ninth year today is because it has had strict rule-based judging processes in place from the start. These rules were framed with the experience that Prasoon Joshi, Ravi Deshpande, Pops and Alok Nanda had acquired judging at festivals across the world.

On the opening day of the festival, we had put up the festival village at Arossim and were expecting about 200 people to turn up. More than 800 people from all over the country turned up. We were short of space, food and water but admen of all shades and descriptions, young and not so young had given the new brand – Goafest - an enthusiastic thumbs up.

Goafest has come a long way since then. A succession of presidents of AAAI and particularly Goafest Committee chairmen have willingly given a good three to four months of their time in a year to make Goafest happen. Their pro-bono work needs to be acknowledged.

Meanwhile, Goafest has kept evolving. In 2008, the AAAI and The Advertising Club of Mumbai joined hands to make the festival stronger, and to make The Abbys at Goafest the most coveted awards in advertising in India. Awards categories have evolved - from five verticals in 2006 (Print, Outdoor, Radio, TV, Media) to about 15 verticals this year. These verticals reflect the evolving importance of ‘new media’ in brand communications. Over a dozen NCDs have willingly shared their time and expertise as jury chairmen and scores of ECDs have done duty as jury members. Award judging rules have been refined over the years. Auditors were added around 2007. In 2010, the Awards Governing Council was created.

The time Shashi Sinha has devoted as Chairman of this Council for three years to keep the award processes on track is worthy of special acknowledgement. Scores of creative gods from around the world have shared their vision of where advertising is going. So have media gods. And gods in evolving specialties from Digital to Sports Marketing to Analytics. Leaders of global communication groups have shared their perspectives. Advertisers and media house owners and CEOs have shared their visions as well as challenges.

Beach fun has been an element of Goafest and an intrinsic part of its charm, and sometimes a source of criticism. But it is everything put together that makes Goafest what it is. This year, Goafest is a bigger event than ever before and I hope every delegate has an awesome time.

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