Award ceremonies are mirrors. Not perfect ones, not without distortion, but mirrors nonetheless. What a jury rewards tells you something real about what the industry values at a particular moment in time. Across three nights at Goafest 2026, the ABBY Awards handed out enough metals and made enough deliberate choices to produce a picture worth examining carefully.
The full picture, across all three days, is more interesting than any single night. There are patterns in the results that no single evening reveals on its own. And there are absences, things that did not win or did not enter, that say as much as the winners.
Night One: The Award Nobody Predicted
Day 1 covered the Media and Publisher ABBYs. EssenceMediacom took Media Agency of the Year. WPP Media took Network Agency of the Year. The Coca-Cola Company took Client of the Year, almost entirely through Thums Up. Jagran Prakashan took Publisher of the Year. All defensible, all expected.
The Grand Prix was not expected. Tribes Communications won it for Kansai Nerolac Paints in the Micro Marketing category, for a campaign called ‘The Barefoot Journey.’ A hyper-local, community-rooted campaign for a paints brand, with no technology layer, no platform integration, no AI hook. Just an insight about who actually uses the product and where, executed with precision and care.
That Grand Prix set the tone for everything that followed, even though nobody knew it at the time. The jury was not rewarding what was fashionable. It was rewarding what was specific.
Night Two: Leo India and the Specialist Sweep
Day 2 covered the specialist creative categories: Digital, Technology, Direct, Health, PR, Design, Branded Content, Brand Experience. Leo India won four of them in a single night. Digital Specialist Agency of the Year (120 points, 24 metals), Technology Specialist (54 points), Direct Specialist (32 points), and Health Specialist (38 points). Tribes Communications took PR Specialist. VML and BMEG tied on Design. Zee Entertainment took Broadcaster of the Year.
Two Grand Prix were handed out. The first went to Mountain Dew’s ‘Darescore’ by Leo India, in Digital Technology. The second went to Centerfruit’s ‘Kaisi Jeebh Laplapayee’ by Perfetti Van Melle India’s in-house team, in Best Use of Voice. One from the industry’s most decorated agency. One from a brand’s own internal team. Both precise, both built around a specific insight about a specific audience.
The in-house Grand Prix deserves its own paragraph. Perfetti Van Melle India’s team did not enter to make a point about in-housing. They entered because they had genuinely good work. And the jury recognised it without ceremony. At a festival where the in-housing debate was one of the defining conversations of the week, the jury simply awarded the best entry in the category, regardless of where it came from. That is how it should work.
Night Three: The Creative ABBYs and What They Confirmed
Day 3 carried the full creative categories: Print, Audio-Visual TV, Digital Film, Audio and Radio, Outdoor, Integrated, Social Content, Creative Commerce, Brand Experience, Branded Content, and Video Craft. The weight of the night is felt in those categories. These are the ones the industry watches most closely. And the results confirmed several things that the first two nights had suggested.
Leo India took Creative Agency of the Year with 640 points and 134 metals, including a Grand Prix. Publicis Groupe took Creative Network Agency of the Year with 796 points, 172 medals, and a Grand Prix. The distance between Publicis and second-placed Omnicom, which came in at 300 points, is not a gap. It is a different conversation entirely.
PepsiCo India won Creative Client of the Year with 150 points and a Grand Prix, driven almost entirely by the Mountain Dew and Lay’s portfolio. The Darescore campaign appeared across Integrated, Brand Experience, Social Content, and Video Craft categories, collecting metals at every stop. That is not luck. A campaign does not travel across categories like that unless it was built with enough depth and specificity to genuinely work in each one.
Creative Agency of the Year: Leo India (640 points, 134 metals, 1 Grand Prix)
Creative Network Agency of the Year: Publicis Groupe (796 points, 172 medals, 1 Grand Prix)
Creative Independent Agency of the Year: Enormous (372 points, 96 metals)
Creative Client of the Year: PepsiCo India (150 points, 1 Grand Prix)
Video Craft Specialist of the Year: Good Morning Films (68 points)
Brand Experience Specialist of the Year: Leo India (70 points)
Branded Content Specialist of the Year: Leo India (38 points)
The Campaign Nobody Was Talking About
The most surprising creative story of Day 3 was not from Leo India or Enormous or McCann. It came from Wisteria, an independent agency, for a client called Shri Bajrang Power and Ispat Limited, a steel manufacturer. The campaign was ‘Band Baaja Bitiya.’
It won Gold in Audio-Visual TV, Golds in Creative B2B categories, Silvers in Social Content, and appeared across multiple other categories. A campaign for an industrial steel brand, built around a wedding and a daughter, winning creative awards in a field dominated by consumer goods and tech clients. That result should stop the industry for a moment.
Because it suggests that the brief, and the courage to execute it honestly, matters more than the client category or the budget. Nobody walked into Day 3 expecting a steel company to be one of the night’s defining creative stories. The jury did not care about the category. It cared about the work.
Johnson’s Baby and the Case for Craft
McCann India’s ‘Project Golden Minute’ for Johnson’s Baby by Kenvue won three Golds in Video Craft: Direction, Music, and Casting. That is a remarkable result in a single area of a single awards show, and it is the kind of result that deserves attention precisely because it is not from the night’s headline agency.
The campaign is built around a simple, emotionally powerful premise: preserving the first minute of a baby’s life. The craft in the execution, the direction, the music, the specific choice of casting, carried it to three Gold-level results in the craft categories. This is what advertising can do when the idea and the execution are equally committed.
Good Morning Films, a production house, won Video Craft Specialist of the Year with 68 points. A production company, not an agency, taking the craft category of the year. That is another signal in the broader story about where genuine execution excellence is sitting in the Indian advertising industry right now. It is increasingly concentrated in specialist production outfits rather than inside full-service agencies.
Enormous: The Most Decorated Agency Without a Grand Prix
Enormous finished Day 3 as Creative Independent Agency of the Year, with 372 points and 96 metals across the full show. That metal count is the highest of any individual agency across the entire ABBYs. And they did not win a single Grand Prix.
That tells you something specific about their creative approach. Campaigns like Britannia’s ‘The Pride Pact,’ Rakshak India’s ‘Zoo Wifi,’ Lahori Zeera’s ‘Har Koi Peera Lahori Zeera,’ and the BGMI work for Krafton are all strong, well-crafted, category-appropriate campaigns that collected metals across multiple categories because they were genuinely good at what they set out to do. But none of them had the singular defining ambition that makes a jury pause and reach for the Grand Prix.
That is not a failure. Ninety-six metals across a three-day awards show is an extraordinary result and reflects a genuine culture of consistent creative quality. But there is a distinction between the agency that produces work that wins reliably and the agency that produces work that stops the room. Enormous is in the first category. The question of whether they want to be in the second, and what it would take to get there, is worth asking.
Tribes Communications: The Most Consistent Story Across Three Days
No agency had a more coherent three-day arc than Tribes Communications. They won the Grand Prix on Day 1 for Kansai Nerolac Paints. They won PR Specialist Agency of the Year on Day 2. On Day 3, they won Gold in Outdoor for Kansai Nerolac’s ‘The Coolest Seva,’ multiple Silvers in Outdoor for HDFC Mutual Fund, and showed up across Brand Experience and Branded Content categories.
Kansai Nerolac itself is worth noting as a client. Two campaigns, two different approaches, both landing at the highest levels across different nights and different judging panels. A media Grand Prix for hyperlocal human insight. A creative Gold for outdoor innovation. That is a client with genuine creative ambition and a relationship with their agency deep enough to keep taking risks.
The Three-Day Pattern, and What It Means
Step back from the individual results and look at all three Grand Prix together: ‘The Barefoot Journey’ for Nerolac on Day 1, ‘Darescore’ for Mountain Dew and ‘Kaisi Jeebh Laplapayee’ for Centerfruit on Day 2, and the integrated work that continued on Day 3. Three different types of work. Three entirely different creative strategies. A hyperlocal community campaign, a branded technology platform, a sonic branding play from an in-house team.
The single thread connecting all of them is specificity. Each one knew exactly who it was for. Each one built something that could only have been built for that specific audience, that specific brand, that specific moment. None of them tried to be everything to everyone. None of them were built around a category convention. Each one had a clear creative logic that ran from brief to execution without deviation.
This is the most important thing the ABBY Awards 2026 said, across all three nights. The era of the broad, safe, category-generic campaign is not just creatively unambitious. It is now also consistently losing to work that is precise. The jury, across different nights and different judging panels, kept arriving at the same conclusion: specificity beats generality.
The Questions the Results Leave Open
Publicis Groupe finished with 796 creative points and nearly 3 times the score of the second-placed network. That dominance raises a question the results cannot answer on their own: does this reflect a genuine creative culture built inside Leo India and the Publicis network in India, or does it also reflect a resource and entry strategy advantage that smaller networks and independents cannot match? The answer is probably both, and the degree to which each factor contributed is something only the agencies inside that ecosystem can honestly assess.
CTV had almost no presence in the Creative ABBYs. The medium is growing. The measurement story is improving. The audience is fragmenting toward connected screens at a meaningful pace. But the work entered and awarded at ABBY 2026 did not reflect that. Either the creative work being produced for CTV is not yet at award level, or the work is not being entered, or the categories are not yet structured to accommodate it. Any of those explanations is worth addressing before ABBY 2027.
The independent agencies outside the top tier showed up with real work. Wisteria, PLAINSPEAK, Sideways Consulting, Drink Water Design, Medulla Communications, tgthr. These are not agencies with the entry volumes of the large networks. But they produced work precise enough to win at the highest levels of certain categories. That breadth of participation is one of the healthiest signals in the entire results set.
A Final Word on What the Awards Actually Measure
Santosh Desai said at the Goafest memorial lecture that advertising buried creativity under award culture just as creators mastered the techniques the industry invented. That is a specific critique: awards can become the goal rather than the measure, and when that happens, the work optimises for being awarded rather than for being effective.
Looking at the full three-day ABBY results with that critique in mind, the honest assessment is mixed. Some of the work that won, the Barefoot Journey, Project Golden Minute, Band Baaja Bitiya, Zoo Wifi, Darescore, is work that was clearly built with a genuine creative ambition that precedes the award entry. These are campaigns where the strategy, the insight, and the execution feel like they came from a real brief about a real audience.
Some other work, and the metal tally across categories from the same agency for the same campaign occasionally hints at this, shows signs of having been built to travel across categories. That is not dishonest. But it is different. And the industry knows the difference, even when it does not always say so.
The best work at ABBY 2026 was built for an audience, not for a jury. The jury just happened to agree.
That alignment is what makes an awards show worth having. When the work that moves real people is also the work that moves the jury, the show is doing its job. When they diverge, it becomes a different kind of exercise. The ABBY Awards 2026, on balance, got more right than wrong. The question for 2027 is whether the industry builds on that or defaults to the familiar.
