Goa Ad Fest

Latest news, Bossman at Goa Ad Fest. The Who’s Who of the agency business were there. The fest had a few media men, and a few brand marketers. Deepak had a lot to bring back from the fest! “Interestingly 90% (and I am not exaggerating ) of the conversation was around how marketing could make sense of New Media and essentially digital”, says Deepak.

The theme this year was ‘Survival of the Freshest’. “GoaFest is about how even one great piece of idea can be celebrated”, said National Creative Director, Leo Burnett.

Being the seminar-lover that he is, tells us about a few speakers with intriguing facts. Arun Tadanki, CEO Yahoo gave the comparison between online and offline news readership in the country. Newspaper readership is one third of online news readership in the country. The fact to grab is that while spends on the newspaper industry are 6500 crores, only a tenth of it, 600 crores is spent on news online!

Arun Tadanki also brought forward an important concern in the agencies these days and presented a very good counter argument to that. Every medium be it television, print or outdoor advertising, has a minimal threshold of spends that a brand needs to give in to in order to achieve the desired results. For example, if a big FMCG product launch needs to be promoted, one cannot expect them to spend just 1 lac on OOH Media. Then WHY do marketers ask us for cheaper solutions when it comes to digital? We need to stop compromising and start asking this question to the marketers who think social media is free.

Tom Doctroff (CEO, JWT China) was the keynote speaker of the Conclave. He put across an interesting note. When they came to China, 90% of their clients were multi-national companies. Today, the split is such that 45% of their clients are local Chinese brands!

There was one sad part about the fest though. Not many agencies entered this year. Sridhar said the agency had sent 30% less entries than in 2009. But, “the reason given by some agencies for not participating is disappointing,” he said.
Colvyn Harris, chairman of GoaFest 2010, concurred. “How can you go one whole year without any quality work?” Sridhar, who also heads the print jury, said, “Though there have not been many quality entries, there are some 5-6 great pieces.”

Deepak also had a good chat with Richard Pinder(COO, Publicis) and Tim Mellors(Chief Creative Officer, Grey Worldwide). He loves meeting people. Deepak’s a very friendly guy! Yes.

Now to the fun part, the inauguration was something fancy. Calvin Harris(CEO, JWT) and Sam Balsara(Co-Chairman, Conclave) came on water scooters to inaugurate. It was lavish and everyone went woohoo!

Most of the people around just had a great time dipping into the waters, enjoying water sports, paragliding, rain-dance, and other JAM sessions.

Deepak got us some photographs from the fest. Apparently he had a lot of fun. Check out:

Tags: deepak goel, drizzlin, goa, goa ad fest, jam, paragliding, rain dance, social media, water scooter, water sports