Keeping with its theme, Brand Baaja Baarat, Goafest 2014, India’s annual advertising carnival welcomed its delegates to the venue with the accompaniment of a live brass band. The venue was decorated like a wedding mandap complete with a havan and seats for the bride and groom.

But the real celebrations were to happen later that evening. Lodestar UM and PHD India swept the Goafest Media Abby Awards 2014 at a glittering ceremony on Thursday evening. Out of a record 600-plus entries from media agencies across the country, 50 entries took home the medal. With a total of 11 awards, including two golds for its work on Tata Safari Storme and Coca-Cola, Lodestar picked up more than 20 per cent of the awards Even though PHD India got fewer medals (five), it included a Grand Prix, the only one handed out in the Media Abbys, and two golds for Be Beautiful and another for Kan Khajura Tesan, a mobile radio initiative for Hindustan Unilever that won awards globally.

This year’s fest also introduced the Publisher Abby’s. Out of 20 awards that were given in that category, Kasturi and Sons, the publisher of The Hindu Business Line, won a gold medal for its campaign for the launch of The Hindu’s Tamil edition. The campaign titled, ‘The world comes alive in Tamil’ was awarded in the category of the best launch of a regional newspaper or magazine.

Earlier in the day, Goafest 2014 had unusual sessions from a 12-year-old CEO and stand-up comedians. Four stand-up comedians from the group All India Bakchod shared their insights with ad men on how to push the boundaries on sensitive issues and still win mass acceptance online without being punished for offensive content.

However, the roaring applause by the delegates was reserved for the Kumaran brothers Shravan and Sanjay. The teenagers, who are co-founders of Go Dimensions, and are arguably India’s youngest app developers, wowed the audience with their story on creating apps and how most of their apps won four stars or more on the Apple IOS platform. When Raj Nayak, CEO, Colours asked the brothers what did their mother feed them, pat came the reply: “We are fed the famous South Indian curd rice”.

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