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Industry unites to draw massive delegation for Goafest 2024
Mumbai: Goafest, South Asia’s premier festival celebrating creativity excellence, continues to drive industry growth and collaboration. This year, the festival has achieved remarkable success with a surge in delegate entries and unprecedented support from industry leaders. Scheduled to take place from 29 to 31 May at the Westin Mumbai, Powai Lake, this year’s event has drawn increased participation from agencies and clients of all scales, underscoring its expanding influence and reach.
The 17th edition of Goafest boasts of an impressive line-up with delegation from media agencies including Havas Media, Publicis Media, Group M, Madison Communications, Initiative Media, OMD, and Zenith Optimedia, among others. Creative powerhouses TLG India, L&K Saatchi & Saatchi, Leo Burnett, FCB Group, Havas Worldwide are also on board, along with brands like Nestle, Tips Industries, Kotak General Insurance, and Airtel. Media giants Bennett Coleman, ABP Group, Zee Media, Navabharat Media Network, et al have also shown unwavering registration support. The festival’s appeal spans multinational agencies to smaller firms, showcasing its inclusive ethos.
Goafest remains a pivotal industry event, driving innovation, creativity, and collaboration year after year. It’s a hub for professionals to share ideas, learn from experts, and showcase groundbreaking work. The festival’s impact resonates throughout the industry, inspiring creativity and enhancing professional networks.
Goafest 2024 chairman of the delegates committee – Sam Balsara expressed his enthusiasm for the upcoming event, stating, “Goafest has always been a beacon of creativity and innovation in the advertising industry. This year’s entries have set a new benchmark for excellence. The support from the industry has been overwhelming, and the record number of registrations is a clear indicator of the vibrant and dynamic nature of advertising media and marketing industry.”
NATIONAL: Amazon Ads has laid out a sharply tech-led vision for the advertising industry in 2026, arguing that artificial intelligence, streaming TV and creator partnerships will combine to turn brand building into a more precise, performance-driven business.
At the heart of the shift, the company says, is the fusion of AI with Amazon’s vast trove of shopping, browsing and streaming signals, allowing advertisers to move beyond blunt reach metrics to campaigns designed around real customer behaviour.
“The future of advertising is not about reaching more people, but the right people with messages that resonate,” said Amazon Ads India head and vice president Girish Prabhu. “By combining AI with deep customer insights, we help brands move from broadcasting campaigns to having meaningful conversations wherever audiences spend their time.”
One of the biggest changes, according to Amazon Ads, will be the collapse of the wall between media planning and creative development. Retail media, powered by first-party data, is increasingly shaping everything from brand discovery to final purchase, pushing marketers to design campaigns around audience insight rather than internal instinct.
AI is also moving from a support tool to a creative engine. Agentic AI, which automates and accelerates production, is expected to make high-quality creative accessible even to small businesses, compressing weeks of work into hours and giving challengers the ability to compete with larger brands on speed and scale.
Behind the scenes, AI-driven analytics will take on a bigger role in campaign optimisation, identifying patterns, spotting opportunities and recommending actions that would previously have required teams of analysts.
Streaming TV is another big battleground. With India’s video streaming audience now above 600 million and connected TV users at 129.2 million in 2025, advertisers are set to treat streaming not just as a branding channel but as a performance engine, measured increasingly by sales, sign-ups and bookings rather than just reach.
Finally, Amazon Ads sees creators and contextual advertising reshaping how brands tell stories. Creators will act less like influencers and more like long-term partners, while scene-aware ads on streaming platforms will allow brands to insert hyper-relevant offers into the flow of what viewers are watching.
Taken together, Amazon Ads argues, these shifts mark a move towards advertising that is both more human and more measurable, where AI handles the complexity, and creativity does the persuading.
