Why Goafest 2010 didn’t award even a single Gold under Interactive Digital Advertising

by Satrajit Sen

Indian digital agencies might be wishing if they had been alchemists, they could convert their bronze and silver to gold at the recently concluded Goafest 2010. Though, Goafest 2010 awarded five Silver and 21 Bronze Abbys under the Interactive Digital Advertising category, there was no Gold. In an attempt to find out where this year’s digital campaigns lagged behind, AlooTechie spoke to some of the award winners and jury members of Goafest 2010.

According to Krishna Kumar, co-founder and chief executive officer, Media2win, it is a shame that this year there were no Gold Abby for digital and it is not that the campaigns didn’t deserve to win. “Digital campaigns should be judged by people who think and breathe in the medium. Having a Twitter handle and a Facebook page doesn’t make one a digital expert. Digital campaigns should be judged on the criterion of innovations using technology and judges should understand that,” Kumar, whose company Media2win had won a Gold Abby at Goafest 2009, said.

Chaya Brian Carvalho, founder and CEO of BC Web Wise and a member of the jury for Interactive Digital Advertising category at Goafest 2010, said, “The jury is used to see top line work that win international awards like Webby, One Show, Cannes, etc, but the environment in which global agencies operate campaigns with larger budgets and larger bandwidth, is totally different than what can be served in the Indian online space. Even so, as we are so exposed to best in class, when we see work from India we cannot but help look at what is the best across the world.”

Speaking on why their campaigns didn’t get a Gold Abby this time, Krishna Kumar of Media2win said the digital media has a lot of limitations and digital campaigns should not be seen or judged in the same way traditional campaigns are judged. For the consumers, the delivery channels for traditional ads don’t change, but in digital, delivery channels differ from consumer to consumer.

“Print or TV media campaigns don’t have technological bottlenecks and can be seen and experienced across the country in a similar way. But in digital, there are issues with kinds of browsers, browsers not supporting flash banners and hence an idea has to be built keeping in mind the 25 to 50 Kb mark and then there is the rigid size of banners. With all these constraints it always boils down to the idea and hence it is important for the judges to understand the idea,” Krishna Kumar said, adding, “Innovation in traditional media revolves around the idea of making the campaign visually attractive, but in digital it is always the concept and its implementation.”

According to Sandip Maiti, CEO, Experience Commerce, when compared to works emerging from UK and US, Indian digital campaigns lag behind when it comes to a combination of creativity, cool factor and usability. “Bandwidth constraints in India, a dominant user base on pirated operating system and legacy browsers like IE6 put a lot of constraints on the development team. I doubt if the jury keeps in mind such issues when taking a call as their perceptions are coloured by virtue of exposure to a lot of digital campaigns in international markets,” Maiti said.

Nakul Chopra, CEO, South Asia, Publicis Worldwide, said, “India is still a very nascent market for digital and most of the digital media used by clients is vanilla stuff. This is the nature of the market due to a variety of factors. I don’t know what standards were used by the jury, but I imagine that the members of the jury are people acquainted with the best digital campaigns around the world. May be that’s why the vanilla work from this market did not measure up to those standards,” Chopra added.

Presenting the jury’s perspective, Sidharth Rao, co-founder and CEO of Webchutney and chairperson of the jury for Interactive Digital Advertising category at Goafest 2010, said, “With the theme of Goafest 2010 harbouring on freshness of idea, concept and creativity, most of the work nominated left room for desire to be scored exceptionally high. While some work was considerably more impressive than the rest, a majority of it lacked the punch needed for a top-notch ‘sit up in your seat and take notice’ moment.”

Sidharth Rao further said, “On the bright side, most agencies and creative pundits will be compelled to review and evaluate their own work and hopefully bring a wave of innovation and interactivity in new projects.” Chaya Brian Carvalho, also a member of the jury, added, “Because we are not giving away Gold easily, we are setting higher benchmarks for the digital work that will be rolled out of India every year. So, all in all I think we the jury, we the winners, are all setting the right trends.”

Vikas Tandon, managing director, Indigo Consulting and another member of the jury, said it is good that the digital industry is setting high standards for itself. “As an industry, we would like to see ourselves compete at the international level and we have every reason to believe that we can. Which is why, perhaps, all the works were evaluated from that standpoint. In addition, as client budgets increase, I am sure a lot of ideas which are currently just bubbling under and need half decent production budgets, will see the light of day,” Tandon said.

Nakul Chopra of Publicis Worldwide said it’s not like the digital campaigns lacked something as there were other categories like Radio where there was hardly any gold. “I see digital communications growing exponentially over the next three to five years in India and have no doubt that the quality will very soon equal the best in the world as it has begun to for other mediums,” Chopra added.

Narasimha Suresh, CEO, Telibrahma, offered a different perspective when he said, “There is a huge gap between brand and digital campaigns. There still exists a lot of vacuum within the mainline agencies when it comes to digital and digital agencies may not be getting the required time and brief from the brands.” Suresh further said, “It would be fair to outline the factors on which Creative Abbys are judged for digital categories. India has a great opportunity to outclass rest of the world in digital but it can only happen with lot more support and encouragement from the jury.”

Chaya Brian Carvalho had final words when she said, “It is really a pity that there is not a single Gold or Silver in a category like website development, and also in almost every other category of the Digital awards and there is no doubt that the yellow metal would have added more glitter to the digital world. Given this scenario, I think every bronze in this segment can be treated as a Gold; every finalist a Silver; and every shortlist a Bronze.”

Disclaimer: AlooTechie is being incubated by Goosefish Media Ventures (GMV), a new media incubator founded by the promoters of Webchutney.