There is a particular kind of conversation that the advertising industry has very well. It is the conversation about transformation. About the future. About what needs to change. Indian advertising has been having versions of this conversation for at least a decade, and Goafest is where it happens most publicly every year. Day 2 of Goafest 2026 was a very good version of that conversation. Whether it moves anything is always the harder question.
The AI Session the Industry Needed
Opening Day 2 with a session called ‘AI Washing: The Truth About AI’ was a brave programming choice. It is one thing to talk about AI opportunity, another to call out the gap between what companies claim and what they actually do. Gulrez Alam of Affle made the most important point of the morning: most organisations talking about being AI-first are, in practice, still in the data cleanup phase. AI is only as intelligent as the data it learns from, and if that data is incomplete, biased, or stale, the AI output reflects all of those problems at scale. This is not a technology limitation. It is an organisational discipline problem, and no vendor can solve it for you.
Niraj Ruparel of WPP brought genuine enthusiasm to what AI is actually enabling right now, and it was worth hearing. Faster prototyping. Democratised creative tools. The ability to reach rural and underserved audiences at scale that was previously impossible. His point is that AI is not replacing creativity; it is removing the friction between a good idea and its execution. That is a real and valuable thing, and the industry is underselling it while overselling the wrong parts of the story.
The honest read on where most Indian companies actually stand with AI is somewhere between Alam and Ruparel: experimental, partially deployed, and in many cases using AI as a label before the underlying infrastructure is ready to support it. Smriti Mehra of Network18 said the media will keep scrutinising those claims. That is the right instinct. The industry’s credibility on AI depends on the gap between claim and reality getting smaller, not larger.
The Agentic Shift Is Closer Than Most Brands Think
Google’s Satya Raghavan gave what was arguably the most consequential session of the day, and it deserved more attention than it probably got. The move he described, from generative AI that creates content on request to agentic AI that acts independently on your behalf, is not a distant future scenario. It is already underway on platforms that hundreds of millions of people use daily. Shopping agents that compare products and complete transactions. Advertising systems that optimise campaigns in real time without human input at each step.
The implication for brands is significant and underappreciated. If consumers increasingly interact with brands through AI agents rather than directly through search or social media, the entire logic of digital advertising changes. You are no longer trying to reach a person. You are trying to be the answer an agent returns. That requires a very different kind of brand investment: in data quality, in structured information, in the kind of credibility that AI systems use to make recommendations. Most brands are nowhere near ready for this, and most media plans do not account for it at all.
On Storytelling, Culture, and the Brief That Arrives Too Late
The NDTV session on culture and storytelling was the morning’s richest hour, and Rahul Kanwal of NDTV made the observation that most honest practitioners in the room already live with: by the time a brand has briefed an agency, had a planning meeting, gotten approvals, and produced something, the cultural moment that inspired the brief has usually passed. The ‘Cockroach Janta Party’ example he used, something that went from social media joke to genuine cultural movement within hours, was funny and recognisable and slightly depressing if you think about it too hard.
Rohit Kapoor of Swiggy had the most useful counterargument. Speed is valuable, but brands that chase every trend without a stable strategic foundation end up confusing people. The brands that show up well in cultural moments are not the ones moving fastest. They are the ones who know their positioning so well that they can move fast without losing themselves. That is a discipline problem more than a speed problem, and it starts with the brief, not the response team.
Sam Balsara of Madison World said what needs to be said every year until it stops being true: the industry is systematically underinvesting in brand building in favour of performance marketing, and the long-term cost of that is compounding quietly on every balance sheet in the room. The brands that will have pricing power in five years are the ones being built today. Performance marketing can harvest that equity. It cannot create it. The industry knows this. The quarterly targets make it easy to forget.
The Data War: Ownership Versus Reach
The Saptharushi session on data ownership was one of the more practically urgent conversations of the day, and it did not get the attention it deserved. Sanjay Sindhwani of Indian Express Online described a shift that publishers across India are quietly going through: moving from anonymous traffic to authenticated first-party ecosystems built through subscriptions and engaged communities. The reason is simple and hard-won. Platforms offer scale. They do not offer ownership. And in a world where privacy regulation is tightening and third-party signals are disappearing, brands and publishers that do not own their audience relationships are building on borrowed ground.
Anjali Madan of Mondelez said something the industry consistently understands and consistently fails to act on: performance marketing and brand building are not separate strategies. They are experienced by the consumer as one brand. When a company over-optimises for short-term ROAS, it does not just affect this quarter’s results. It erodes the equity that makes next quarter’s performance marketing work in the first place. The math is straightforward. The behaviour does not follow, because the person being measured on ROAS and the person responsible for brand equity are usually different people with different KPIs.
Mayank Shah of Parle Products brought the most grounding perspective of the session. Mass FMCG in India is still largely a top-of-funnel story. Data-driven personalisation works beautifully in high-involvement categories where the consumer is already actively seeking. Selling a biscuit to someone who does not know they want a biscuit yet is a different problem, and it still requires mass reach, cultural resonance, and distribution. The data platforms are tools. They are not a strategy.
Television: Not Dead, But Overdue for Honesty
‘TV Is Dead. Long Live TV.’ was the afternoon’s most discussed session title, and the panel made a serious case for why the medium still deserves its place in the media plan. Avinash Pandey of IBDF walked in with the numbers: nearly 900 million viewers, 190 million TV homes, 6% annual penetration growth, and over 100 million new homes expected by 2028. The medium is not shrinking. Its delivery method is changing, and the industry needs to get cleaner about what that distinction means for planning, measurement, and investment.
The point Rajiv Dubey of Dabur made about regional India deserves to be said more loudly and more often. TV penetration in several Indian states is still above 80 to 90 percent. The fragmentation narrative that dominates planning conversations in Mumbai and Delhi is an accurate description of a specific consumer, in a specific income bracket, in a specific geography. It is not a description of India. Brands that plan for the India they imagine rather than the India that exists pay for it in reach, recall, and eventually revenue.
Akshay Agrawal of Sony made the most forward-looking argument for television: the medium’s future is not passive reach but participative engagement. Shows that invite audiences to vote, follow journeys, and engage on second screens are building something that pure digital formats struggle to replicate, which is a shared national moment. Indian Idol and KBC built their franchise value on participation. That logic is still sound. The question is whether broadcasters invest in it aggressively enough or continue defending yesterday’s model.
Prasoon Joshi at the Student Session
Not everything important at Goafest happens on the main stage. Prasoon Joshi, who chairs Omnicom Advertising India and Prasar Bharati, spent a significant part of Day 2 at the GoaFresh student session. For someone with his profile, that choice says something. The keynote stages are where the industry talks to itself. The student sessions are where it actually invests in what comes next.
He talked about discipline and authenticity in a way that only someone who has spent decades writing poetry and advertising simultaneously can. His argument against over-relying on AI was not technological but creative: AI can only process what already exists. The genuinely new idea, the unexpected connection, the thing nobody has said yet, that still comes from a human who has lived something, observed something, and had the courage to express it honestly.
“Stay original. Stay authentic. Because if you lose authenticity, you have nothing.”
It was the right message, in the right room. Young people entering advertising right now face the peculiar pressure of building careers in an industry that is simultaneously celebrating AI tools and insisting that human creativity is irreplaceable. Joshi’s framing gives them a way to hold both things at once: use the tools, but never let them replace the point of view.
The Awards: Leo India’s Night, and Why It Was Earned
When the Creative ABBYs began, the evening produced a result that the work justified. Leo India won four specialist agency categories in one night: Digital, Technology, Direct, and Health. That breadth is rare, and it does not happen by accident.
Looking at the campaigns that drove the wins, ‘Darescore’ for Mountain Dew, ‘Flippin Amazin’ for Flipkart, ‘Project Early Periods’ for P&G Whisper, ‘BGMI Career Mode’ for Krafton, ‘Project Mitti’ for Lay’s, a pattern is visible. These are not executions that were extended across categories after the fact. They are ideas that were built with enough specificity and depth that they naturally worked across platforms, audiences, and entry categories. That kind of creative architecture is harder than it looks, and the rest of the industry would do well to study it rather than dismiss it as an entry strategy.
Digital Specialist Agency of the Year: Leo India (120 points, 24 metals)
Technology Specialist Agency of the Year: Leo India (54 points)
Direct Specialist Agency of the Year: Leo India (32 points)
Health Specialist Agency of the Year: Leo India (38 points)
PR Specialist Agency of the Year: Tribes Communications Pvt. Ltd. (50 points, 11 metals)
Design Specialist Agency of the Year: VML and BMEG Private Limited (tied, 18 points each)
Broadcaster of the Year: Zee Entertainment Enterprises Limited (82 points, 15 metals)
Two Grand Prix, and the Thing They Share
The first Grand Prix went to Mountain Dew’s ‘Darescore’ by Leo India in the Digital Technology (Utility/Tool) category. Darescore is a real-time fearlessness scoring system built for gamers, tied directly to in-game performance. It is not a campaign in the traditional sense. It is a branded product the audience chose to use on its own terms. Most advertising asks for attention. This created something people wanted. That is a different and harder thing to do, and it is the right idea to put a Grand Prix on.
The second Grand Prix went to Centerfruit’s ‘Kaisi Jeebh Laplapayee’ by Perfetti Van Melle India’s own in-house team, in Technology (Best Use of Voice). This result deserves particular attention. An in-house team, not an external agency, took the highest award of the night in a technology category. They built the idea around the brand’s most recognisable sonic asset and executed it with enough craft to beat everything else in the field. For independent agencies watching, this is worth taking seriously.
In-house teams with deep brand knowledge and growing technical capability are no longer entering just to participate.
Tribes Communications had a strong night in PR, built on a sustained body of work for HDFC Mutual Fund across Sheconomist, DivyaDeep, Mutually Funded, and Barni Se Azadi. What is notable is the consistency. Multiple campaigns for one client, all with a clear strategic thread, all performing at award level. That is what a genuinely productive agency-client relationship looks like over time, and it is harder to build than any single campaign.
Put all three Grand Prix across Days 1 and 2 together, Nerolac’s hyperlocal ‘Barefoot Journey’, Mountain Dew’s technology-driven ‘Darescore’, and Centerfruit’s sonic ‘Kaisi Jeebh Laplapayee’, and the jury’s taste becomes clear. It is not about medium or format or budget. It is about specificity. Every Grand Prix winner knew exactly who it was for, built something precise for that person, and did not try to be everything to everyone. That is both a creative principle and a business one, and the industry would benefit from applying it more consistently.
What Day 3 Needs to Answer
The Creative ABBYs on Day 3 carry the categories that the industry watches most closely: film, print, outdoor, integrated. The first two nights have set a high bar for what a Grand Prix means at this edition of Goafest. The question is whether the creative jury finds work that meets it, and whether Indian advertising’s most celebrated traditional formats produce ideas as precise and purposeful as the ones that won this week.
Read also: Goafest 2026 Day 1: The Industry Came to Reset. The Trophies Rewarded What Already Works
