Media & Publishers Abbys: How the winners are celebrating their wins

Mindshare was adjudged Media Agency of the Year with 14 metals, including 4 Gold, 6 Silver and 4 Bronze Abbys. 

MA Parthasarathy, CEO, Mindshare India:
“Winning Goafest is a fabulous feeling. All credit goes to our talented and passionate team, and to our clients, who inspire us to new heights. The Golds that we won on Close Up, Lifebuoy, Brooke Bond and ABC are particularly satisfying as they brought together data, content and digital to create very distinctive solutions.” 

Amin Lakhani, Chief Operating Officer, Mindshare South Asia:
“The body of work that Mindshare is representing this year at Goafest is very impressive. The work spans across media, content, tech and data with several clients. Even if you look at it from a geographical representation you will find work from all our offices. I am hoping that the industry sees and recognizes the effort and good work that we have done. 

The zing factor in our work this time is data-led creativity. Mindshare has put in a lot of work analysing data and solving problems for clients across the spectrum whether it is using Big Data and solving rural marketing challenges or whether it is using data and producing a bespoke solution for a BFSI client. 

Data is informing us to create the right messaging at the right place, at the right time. The information is there and the beauty is how you use that to improve connect with your consumers. 

We are hoping to set the tone for this year beginning with the Abbys and carrying it forward till the end of the year. Fingers crossed and let’s hope for the best.” 

Placed second was Madison Media with 11 metals, comprising 3 Gold, 1 Silver and 7 Silver Abbys. The agency scored a total of 58 points. 

Vikram Sakhuja, CEO, Madison Media:
“We are delighted. We came second although we would have loved to come first. Congratulations to Mindshare, who have done a fantastic job. We are delighted because we won around 10 metals, three of which were Golds. We covered a diverse amount of work apart from our Tata Salt campaign, which got 2 metals. Everything else got one metal each, which shows a good variety. Also, our work showcased on old conventional media as well as modern properties; if you look at Godrej Properties campaign, that had used data, tech and creativity. 

This Goafest, if you look at all the categories and sub categories, each one has a very clear reason to be. We have 180-odd shortlists, where digital had about half and traditional had about half. 

Marrying data with creativity starts with integrated teams and somewhere along the line the people who are leading the teams hold the mantle. Sometimes it will be a traditional planner and sometimes like in the case of Godrej Properties it was the digital team that took centre stage with support from traditional.” 

With 7 metals, Initiative Media secured the third spot. The agency’s tally included 2 Gold, 1 Silver and 4 Bronze Abbys. Initiative’s total points stood at 38. 

Vaishali Verma, CEO, Initiative:
“I am absolutely thrilled and delighted that Initiative is at No. 3 at this year’s Goafest Media Abbys. What makes it heartening is that all our 25 shortlists are across the width of our clients – ranging from Reckitt Benckiser to Amazon to Hamdard, InfoEdge, American Tourister. The awards have been won across multiple categories, which is a manifestation of the depth of our good work. All campaigns have been path breaking, innovative and to me each one of them is a winner whether they won a metal tonight or not. I will be completing a year here as a CEO and the last 10 months have gone into strengthening our product and people across functions, and we will continue to do so. I would like to congratulate my entire team at Initiative for putting up such a stellar performance and I would like to thank all our clients for pushing us to scale newer heights and always believing in us.” 

Dentsu Aegis Networks’ Carat India was placed fifth among the Media Abby winners with 3 metals – 1 Gold and 2 Silvers. The agency scored 20 points. 

Mayank Bhatnagar, Senior VP & Head - West, Carat India:
“Wow! Very happy! There are two campaigns that we won awards for. We won 1 Gold and 1 Silver Abby. Both are extremely close to us. One campaign is about how a brand can come forward and help a cause. The second is how we can use the biggest property in India and help the brand using data and tech to support real time personalization. So, both the awards are very special for us and show the depth of the work that we do from traditional media to new age media using technology and data together to bring our perfect solutions for the brand. 

The award that we won for IPL for our client Mondelez – we won Silver for this – the challenge was how we can get all 14 brands together in IPL, as the tournament is so cluttered. We were using real time data and the API from Cricbuzz and we created 114 different ads, where we were targeting different segments with different messaging through ads. 

The campaign we won Gold for was for Cadbury Bournvita, which focused on the pressure that parents put on their kids especially during exam times. This campaign was really about how kids can go about and do really well in their future career if they really follow their passion.” 

Signpost India from Street Talk, won a total of 4 metals, which comprised 1 Silver and 3 Bronze Abbys. The agency was a tad below Carat with total 18 points. 

Rajat Sikder, Senior Vice President, Street Talk, a division of Signpost India:
“It feels amazing. This is the Mecca of all awards in India, at least. We won 4 awards today – 1 Silver and 3 Bronze. It is an amazing feeling because we have an amazing team. We are a company that is not aligned with any media or creative house. We are mostly into outdoor. Every campaign and every client we have pitched for and executed and every piece of work we are giving it our 200 per cent. Signpost is about 11 years old. Our head office is in Mumbai, but we are spread across the country in Delhi, Kolkata, Bengaluru and Pune. We have a few more nominations on the third day of Goafest and hope to winsome more awards.

This is the first time we are participating in Goafest, it has been an amazing experience and we are looking forward to more in the next two days. I was discussing earlier with my team members that even if we are not putting in our participation, we should still come to Goafest. It is not just about contesting and winning an award, it is more than that. We have spent a lot of time in the AV room trying to see other people’s work and it will help us in our own work. I see a lot of transparency at Goafest. Learning is the key at Goafest.”

FoxyMoron won a solitary Gold in Media Abbys for the ‘Meethe Bahane’ campaign done for Hershey’s, which fetched the agency a total of 8 points. 

Nishit Vora, Account Director, FoxyMoron:
“Extremely stoked to have won this award. There have been a lot of collaborations and partnerships done and we really believed in the idea so really happy to get approved for this. 

The concept for the campaign came purely from the insight that we keep coming up with reasons to run away from the food that our mothers give. We really wanted to give it a twist by getting Chef Ranveer Brar onboard to support the story and give them reasons to actually consume the food that we make. 

It feels extremely great to be here at the Abbys. I really like the idea of the Master Jury, it is a great change. Another thing that Sudhanshu mentioned is bringing back the credibility and now we have realised this and are working towards it. We are extremely happy for that.” 

In Publisher Abby, ABP One from ABP Pvt Ltd bagged 1 Gold ad 1 Silver Abby, taking its total points to 12. 

ABP spokesperson:
“The campaign that we did was for Sugar Free, called ‘Stop the Sugar not the Tea’. The idea was to get people who consumed black tea without sugar to try Sugar Free as a variant. The campaign ran for three months and grew the brand’s share by 14 per cent from their then level of sales. The biggest learning from this campaign was how we understood the psyche of the Bengali audience, which we have been doing over the years and leverage it to create this disruptive growth for the brand.”

Equinox Digital, an arm of Publicis Media, too, bagged a Gold in Media Abbys for its campaign done for ZEE5, where the OTT player turned Google Search ads into real-time news portal during the Assembly Elections results.

Equinox Digital spokesperson:
“When you are looking at search as a platform, very few people look for innovation. What we thought about was integrating technology and at Equinox, we believe whatever objective you have should be hidden behind that and be a seamless solution for the consumer. It was a user driven solution. 

Today, we have X number of news channels coming up and everybody wants to be updated on the latest news. We thought of the best solution that the brand could offer and what we could do as an agency partner. The thought was to bring everything in one place and make the user experience better and that was by providing the best and the most updated news. 

One thing that Tanmay Mohanty used to tell us is that whatever campaigns you are running, even though it is for the brand, it has to be user-centric. We hope the next few days at the Abbys will be as fantastic as today and that we will learn a lot and implement the learning in our future campaigns.”