Goa Fest 2008: Food for thought

By Ramya Ramamurthy,CNBC-TV18

This year from the Conclave on day one to the Abby’s on the final day, entire advertising and marketing community seemed to be in the mood for some collective soul searching. How to create value for advertisers, how to earn respect for themselves, and how to take forward the united front that the AAAI and the Ad Club have forged this year. Those were some of the questions dogging the best minds in the business.

The third time seems to be the charm for Goafest. Beyond the 3,000 delegates that the united front of the Ad Club of Bombay and the AAAI attracted, advertisers called on the Goafest. Nokia, Marico and ITC all made it to the media conclave to speak on matters close to their heart, and how their agency partners could add more value to their work.

"Agencies should be true to the brand first and then the client because quite often, one notices that when there is a new Marketing Manager or a new Brand Manager or a new creative person from the agency, the brand goes topsy turvy and suddenly loses its direction and that is not something good, because at the end of the day the brand, the client and the agency stands to suffer if they do this." says D Shivakumar, VP & MD, Nokia India

Saugata Gupta, CEO, Marico adds, "The question to be asked to a lot of advertising agencies is, 'how much time are you spending on developing value from the existing cliens and chasing new clients' because I think just like any service, you see the cost of acquisition is far higher than the cost of retaining an existing consumer. I think if that practice is followed, they will be able to get much more longer-term value."

"The problem is not the value problem. The problem is I think clients see our value a lot more than internally that the agency does because I think there are a lot of people inside the agency structure of the erstwhile structure of the agency you don’t quite understand the value the agency itself is creating because they may not be involved in the direct creation of value. I am not talking about the creative people who create the value or anything of that sort. It could be a client servicing person who creates the maximum value for the business." feels R Balakrishnan, Chairman, Lowe India.

Goafest is an ideal opportunity for young creatives to soak in the work done by their peers. It is also a chance to spot work that may not have been seen by too many.

It doesn’t stop at the short listed entries. If you haven’t seen this year’s print grand prix winner entered by Leo Burnett for Luxor Highlighters, we don’t blame you. It was released in the Free Press Journal just once. We all know that that kind of one time release has more to do with winning awards and less to do with building brands. While the creative was very good, the fact that Lowe and not Leo Burnett is the official agency made the win even more questionable.

The controversy had been laid to rest with Leo Burnett saying it has Luxor’s permission to enter the ad in all award shows across the world and the AAAI has accepted that. But at Goa, before the Luxor-Lowe controversy broke, this is what Leo Burnett had to say, "I think Goafest is following exactly the same principles or rules that any major global award show will follow. All of us are convinced that that is the right thing to do"

Some people have always alleged scams and will always allege scams and I would suggest, just ignore them.

The 70-member jury had asked for all entries to be accompanied by a proof of release or a client letter. It had to be for work done in the last year for a genuine client. Beyond this, the organisers claimed it could not release scam work.

"The idea was not to police whether it is a mass-market release or a selected release. That is something no festival has been able to do. I think there is a certain innovativibility of this phenomenon. It happens in Cannes, it happens in all the other festivals. But normally, as somebody said, if it has been really well done, only then does a jury respond. 9 out of 10 works actually get lost out by the jury itself." adds Ajay Chandwani, Member, Abby Awards Jury Committee & CEO - Percept H.

There are no easy answers to the question, to scam or not to scam or rather how much to scam. So, let’s focus on the celebration part of it.

"The energy, the enthusiasm, the passion that you see amongst a very young India whose average age is 24 and our under 30s are the majority of the people here. It is completely different from what Cannes is. Cannes is like an institution and it is old and boring actually. It just so happens that since it is recognised as a platform for best in the world, everybody enters. Therefore it has become the gold standard. Let’s see if we can unseat them." says Jagdip Bakshi, Chairman - Goafest 2008 & CEO, Contract.

But if Goafest was trying to model itself on Cannes, there were some serious hurdles to clear. The fact that two major agencies McCann Erickson and Lowe were not participating was the least of them.

"I feel people describe Goafest as the Cannes of the East. For it to come anything close to Cannes, what it is going to need to have is a globally recognised standard, because the only way that people are going to enter the show outside India is if they believe the standards against which work is judged is the standard to which the highest standards of the world are held. So, I think this is all on a course that will get to a place where there isn’t any fundamental debate about what the award shows are recognising and what the intrinsic value of the Abby Awards amounts to." adds Stephen Gatfield, CEO, Lowe Worldwide

"Nike has done so well internationally and Sony does very well and Coca-Cola does very well. That is fantastic. I think part of the opportunity for India - everything in India is big. Population is big, the opportunity is so large. The sheer volume of media is huge. So, I’d love to see some things with scale from this market, things that everybody gets to see. There is no issue about visibility, everyone has seen it." says Craig Davis, Chief Creative Officer, JWT Worldwide.

Next year the Goafest may be extended by a day with categories like design and mobile added to the seven existing categories and the judging could be held at the venue itself to prevent any leaks of results that end up undermining the awards credibility.