MAM
AAAI announces workshop contest for young creatives
MUMBAI: As a part of its Diamond Jubilee Celebrations, the Advertising Agencies Association of India (AAAI) has announced the The AAAI-AdFest Young Lotus Workshop Contest 2006 for Young Creatives.
This contest offers Young Creative People, who are under 30 years of age, with less than five years experience and currently employed in an AAAI member agency, a chance to win a trip and an opportunity to participate in the AdFest in Pattaya, Asia’s premier creative awards function.
This will be an effort from AAAI to encourage young creative talent. The association believes that this initiative will also help young creative people in their member agencies get international exposure and experience.
All young creative people (two members per team, one copywriter and one art director), from all AAAI member agencies will have to create a print ad (25 cms height x 16 CMS width, in English) on eye donation.
“Only one entry per team is allowed. The entries received will be judged by an eminent panel of top creative directors of AAAI member agencies and the decision of the jury would be final and binding,” said AAAI Executive Committee Member Vinod Nair, who is charge of this year’s initiative.
The winning team will be sent, by AAAI, to attend the AdFest Young Lotus Workshop which will be a two days affair from 7 – 9 March 2006.
There, their work produced at the workshop will be judged by an international panel of judges of the AdFest and the winners will be announced during the AdFest event, at the Crystal Lotus Award ceremony, with the recipients receiving a certificate of recognition for their work.
The winning team will be allowed to attend all sessions of the AdFest, which is being held in Pattaya, Thailand from 9 – 11 March 2006.
The last date for receiving entries at the AAAI office is 13 January 2006.
Brands
Canva appoints MangoAI co-founder Nirmal Govind as chief algorithms officer
Acquires MangoAI to power performance driven AI at scale
MUMBAI: Design platform Canva has appointed Nirmal Govind as its first chief algorithms officer following the acquisition of AI powered creative optimisation start up MangoAI. The move signals a sharper focus on performance driven artificial intelligence across Canva’s global ecosystem.
Govind, who co founded MangoAI in 2025, built the company around reinforcement learning for generative video advertising. In simple terms, it helped brands not just create ads, but continually refine them using data driven feedback loops. With the acquisition now complete, that experimentation mindset is set to scale inside Canva’s rapidly expanding AI stack.
Before launching MangoAI, Govind served as vice president of data science and engineering at Netflix, where he spent eight years leading teams across content, studio, creative production and streaming. He was part of Netflix’s executive staff, working closely with senior leadership on creative algorithms, localisation and production innovation.
His earlier career reflects a strong operations research pedigree. He held senior technology roles at Lightning Bolt Solutions and worked in engineering and optimisation at Intel Corporation and IBM. Academically, he holds a PhD in industrial engineering and operations research from Penn State University and a master’s degree from University of California, Berkeley.
For Canva, the appointment is more than a new title. It reflects the growing importance of algorithms in shaping not only how designs look, but how they perform. As brands demand measurable outcomes from creative work, the line between art and optimisation is blurring. Canva appears keen to sit right at that intersection.
With Govind now steering its algorithms strategy, Canva is betting that the future of design will not just be beautiful, but intelligently tuned for impact.
