AD Agencies
Maddys 2025 goes global, gets glossier
MUMBAI: The Advertising Club Madras is bringing the heat with the 43rd edition of Maddys, giving India’s longest-running advertising awards a slick new sheen – and a global passport. This year’s rebooted avatar doesn’t just honour great work, it redefines the very format with new categories, a heavyweight jury, a transparent scoring system, and an international welcome mat.
Themed ‘AI vs AI – Awesome Ideas vs Awesome Ideas’, Maddys 2025 goes all in on the creative wars in a tech-saturated world – and the stakes are high.
For starters, it’s going international. The awards will now invite entries from across borders, aligning themselves with global benchmarks. With 155 categories across six streams – Creative, Digital, Media, Design & Print Craft, Film & Audio Craft, and Regional Pride (Tamil) – this isn’t just a celebration, it’s a campaign for creative excellence.
The 2025 edition also introduces Grand Prix honours, a one-day celebration that starts with breakfast and ends with a cocktail, and a robust, two-tiered judging system scored on Strategy & Insights, Originality & Creativity, and Execution & Impact – minus the fluff of performance metrics.
The dream jury team includes:
. Karthi Marshan, former Kotak CMO, and Senthil Kumar of VML India co-chairing Creative MADDYS
. Ajay Gupte of Wavemaker chairing Media
. Dr. Apurva Chamaria of Google helming Digital
. Filmmaking duo Gayatri & Pushkar chairing Film & Audio Craft
. Santosh Padhi of Into Creative on Design & Print Craft duty
. Chocka of OPN taking charge of Regional Pride Maddys
Process czar Gokul Krishnamoorthy returns as honorary jury convenor and process auditor, ensuring the judging stays squeaky clean and crystal clear.
Aside from bragging rights, agencies and clients can win titles across streams. Grand Prix winners bag 30 points, with Gold (15), Silver (7), Bronze (3), and Shortlists (1) rounding out the leaderboard — all contributing to the prestigious “Agency of the Year” and “Client of the Year” crowns across categories.
From art directors to Tamil-language storytellers, from global digital campaigns to handcrafted print ideas — Maddys 2025 isn’t just turning up the volume, it’s tuning into the future. Ready, set, pitch.
AD Agencies
The smell that told Mumbaikars which station was next
Tata AIA turns Mumbai’s Parle-G memory into a sharp, city-wise outdoor play
MUMBAI: When a biscuit factory became Mumbai’s unofficial station announcement. Long before smartphone maps and automated announcements, commuters on Mumbai’s Western line relied on their noses. As trains rolled into Vile Parle, compartments filled with the warm, sweet smell of baking biscuits from the Parle-G factory. It was a cue to gather bags, wake dozing children and shuffle towards the door.
Now that memory has been pressed into service by Tata AIA Life Insurance as part of its 25-year anniversary outdoor campaign — a city-by-city salute to the lived moments that shape urban life.
One hoarding, mounted close to the old factory site, reads: “We have been protecting Mumbaikars since Vile Parle smelled of freshly made biscuits.” Spare. Local. Loaded.
The broader campaign, rolled out across major metros, leans hard into contextual storytelling. In Kolkata, it nods to trams. In Pune, to Magarpatta’s transformation. In Bengaluru, to a time before IT parks. In Chennai, to OMR before it led to tech corridors. Each line anchors the brand’s longevity to a shared civic memory.
The Mumbai execution is the most evocative. For decades, the Parle-G factory was more than a production unit. It was a sensory landmark. Residents nearby set their clocks by the factory horn. Office-goers marked their commute by the waft of glucose and flour. When the plant shut, the city lost more than jobs. It lost a rhythm.
By placing the hoarding beside the former factory, the insurer collapses distance between copy and context. The site does half the storytelling. The rest comes from commuters who remember opening steel tiffins packed with Parle-G, or jolting awake as the train slowed.
It is a neat piece of brand positioning. Rather than trumpet balance sheets or policy counts, Tata AIA borrows emotional equity from the city itself. Twenty-five years becomes less a milestone and more a presence — steady, local, embedded.
Outdoor advertising is often a blunt instrument. This one is anything but. It whispers. It remembers. And in doing so, it sells trust without sounding like it is selling at all.
The scent may have faded. The memory has not.
