Brands
Agencies must connect, not just communicate, say industry leaders at Goafest 2025
MUMBAI: Goafest 2025’s marquee session, ‘Ignite The Shift’, powered by Hindustan Times and Amar Ujala, staged a spirited conversation on marketing’s evolving ecosystem. The panel, titled “Merging Boundaries: From Placement to Partnership”, brought together five sharp minds—Google India director – marketing partners Satya Raghavan, Starcom India CEO Rathi Gangappa, JioStar head of revenue, entertainment & international Ajit Varghese, Tata Commercial Vehicles CMO Shubhranshu Singh, and moderator Omnicom Media Group India group CEO Kartik Sharma—for a high-voltage discussion on what defines partnership, performance, and brand-building in 2025.
Opening the session with nostalgic candour, Sharma remarked, “Media was once a business of placement; now it’s a business of partnership”. He added that today’s agencies juggle multiple hats—from storytellers and influencers to data miners and tech integrators.
Gangappa drove the point home: “It’s no longer innovate or die—it’s connect or die”. She called on agencies to shift from delivering solutions to forging seamless partnerships. “Partnerships today are about connecting the dots—storytelling, media, commerce, influence, even loyalty—and doing it all with intelligence and empathy”.
Varghese reinforced that clients today demand more, “Agencies now invest in first-party data and tech stacks, stitching solutions across OTT, mobile, and CTV”. From integration to insight, agencies, he said, must become navigators across a complex media map. “Clients expect segmentation, measurement, and execution to be interlinked. When they demand precision, we bend backwards”.
Raghavan added flair with an Avengers analogy. “The agency is literally the CMO’s superpower”, he joked. “In today’s marketing universe, consumers flit between universes—Youtube, search, Shorts, and shopping. Pinpointing them with the right message at the right moment is the challenge—and technology is the bridge”.
Singh brought it back to brand belief, “Separating performance from brand-building is a disservice”. He warned against the trap of short-termism. “If everything is dictated by last-click logic, brands lose soul. Media must also create scale and salience”.
The panel echoed a shared frustration with how measurement obsession has stifled creativity. Singh recalled, “We’ve become a business of attribution. But not everything valuable is measurable”. Raghavan nodded, saying that AI should empower creativity, not constrain it. “We’re now designing better razors, not just machines that shave you”.
As the session closed, Sharma fired a rapid question: “What are you doing today that would’ve sounded crazy five years ago?”
Raghavan shared that Google India had built an internal martech platform just for partner enablement. Varghese said he uses AI to ideate around obscure marketing days like “World Menstrual Hygiene Day”. Singh, meanwhile, said it’s time to rename the agency itself. “The term ‘media agency’ no longer fits. We’re something more”.
Brands
Google nears Nvidia in race for world’s most valuable company
Market cap gap narrows as Google hits $4.65 trillion, Nvidia at $4.86 trillion.
MUMBAI: In the AI gold rush, even the giants are sprinting and Google is suddenly gaining ground. Google is rapidly closing in on Nvidia in the race to become the world’s most valuable publicly listed company, with the gap between the two narrowing sharply amid diverging stock momentum. The tech giant’s market capitalisation has surged to around $4.65 trillion, following a more than 140 per cent rise in its share price over the past year.
That rally has added over $2.6 trillion in value in just 12 months, including nearly $900 billion since January alone. Its stock recently hovered at $381.80, slipping marginally by 0.04 per cent, but still reflecting strong upward momentum.
Nvidia, meanwhile, continues to hold the top spot with a valuation of approximately $4.86 trillion. The chipmaker crossed the $5 trillion milestone in October last year and peaked at $5.27 trillion on 27 April. However, its shares have largely plateaued over the past six months, rising just 0.2 per cent recently to $199.99.
The contrast in trajectories is striking. While Nvidia has seen relatively flat movement, Google has gained over 36 per cent in the same six-month period. Barron’s estimates suggest that if current trends hold, the valuation gap could shrink to as little as $190 million by the time Nvidia reports its first-quarter earnings on 20 May.
Daily momentum paints a similar picture. Nvidia recorded average daily gains of about 0.66 per cent last month, compared to Google’s stronger 1.42 per cent, an edge that could prove decisive in the short term.
Driving Google’s resurgence is its aggressive push into artificial intelligence across its ecosystem, from search and YouTube to cloud computing. The company has already invested $144 billion in capital expenditure over the past two years and plans to deploy a further $490 billion over the next two.
Its cloud division is also gathering pace. Google Cloud reported an order backlog of nearly $220 billion in the latest quarter, with total backlog touching a record $462 billion, around half of which is expected to be realised within two years. The company’s entry into chip sales is also beginning to factor into its growth narrative.
The last time Google briefly topped the S&P 500 by market value was in February 2016, when it edged past Apple for just two days. This time, the stakes and the numbers are far higher.
At the heart of the contest lies a single force: artificial intelligence. As both companies pour billions into infrastructure, chips and platforms, the leaderboard is no longer just about size, it is about who can scale the future faster.
