India’s oldest advertising awards gets a sharp makeover

GOA: India’s advertising industry has a new obsession with credibility. The Abby Awards, the country’s most venerated creative prize, is not waiting to be told it needs to change. It is sprinting ahead of the curve and it wants the world to notice.

Dheeraj Sinha, president of The Advertising Club and chief executive of McCann India, and Ajay Kakar, chairperson of the Abby Awards 2026, sat down ahead of Goa Fest 2026 to lay out what the 57th edition of the awards will look like. The short answer: considerably more ambitious than the 56th.

The headline move is bringing in Ernst & Young not merely as an auditor, the role the firm has traditionally played, but as an end-to-end process consultant for the entire awards. From briefing jury members to verifying client entries, EY now owns the process. “Caesar should not only be above board, but also be seen as above board,” said Kakar. It is a signal aimed squarely at sceptics who have long questioned the rigour of India’s homegrown award shows.

The category overhaul is equally striking. Where there were once eight categories, there are now 18. New entrants include B2B, creative commerce, social content and influencer marketing, and user data, a frank acknowledgment that the business of advertising has moved well beyond the 30-second television spot. Three legacy categories, green, red and diversity, equity and inclusion, have been folded into a single sustainable development goals category, tidying up what had become a cluttered corner of the awards.

On the media side, four new categories have been added, three of which are built around artificial intelligence: innovative use of AI in media planning, innovative use of AI in media operations and content, and innovation in media buying. “It is not about AI,” Kakar was quick to clarify. “It is about the innovative use of AI.” The distinction matters. At a time when every awards show from Cannes to Clio is scrambling to accommodate AI entries, the Abbys are trying to set a higher bar, rewarding ingenuity, not mere adoption.

The awards have also introduced a client of the year prize for both creative and media, acknowledging what the industry has long known: the best campaigns are rarely made by agencies alone. Network-level awards, creative network of the year and media network of the year, recognise the consolidation sweeping the global holding-company landscape. But lest anyone conclude this is a big-boys game, a separate independent agency of the year category ensures that a one-year-old shop can stand on the same stage as a WPP subsidiary.

The numbers behind the show are, by any measure, healthy. Some 300 companies have entered, submitting roughly 4,000 pieces of work. For context, Kakar pointed out, most industry veterans struggle to name more than five media agencies and ten creative shops. The breadth of participation tells its own story about how seriously the Indian industry takes this particular prize.

The jury is the other front on which the Abbys are pressing their case for global relevance. For the first time in the awards’ history, four international jury chairs, all of them senior figures in the global creative circuit, have signed on. “These big people do not lend their names for PR,” said Kakar. Their presence is a statement: the Abbys are no longer content to be a domestic affair dressed up in global language.

Sinha framed it all through the lens of brand-building. “Brands are only those which withstand the test of time by remaining constant and yet evolving,” he said. Fifty-seven years in, the Abbys appear to have internalised the lesson. The question now is whether the work that lands on the jury’s table is ready to match the ambition of the platform that judges it. If the entries bear out the categories, India’s advertising industry will have earned its moment on the world stage. If they do not, the Abbys will have done something arguably more useful: lit a fire under everyone who is still treating AI, data and commerce as tomorrow’s problems.