Goafest 2008 – Sun, fun and gun(n)

After a lot of hard selling, pushing and shoving I managed to reach Goa’s Cavelossim Beach to attend the (third) Goafest 2008. This time it was special because two major groups of the industry – Ad Club and Advertising Association of India (AAAI) had teamed up to celebrate the festival and also share the stage for the annual Abby Awards.

To be honest, Goafest is all about a lot of networking, booze, eye-candy and good music adding up to a long fun weekend for the us ad guys. For some serious learning we attended talks by well known international speakers like Craig Davis of JWT,  Scott Goodson of Strawberry Frog, Stephen Gatfield of Lowe, Donald Gunn of The Gunn Report. The common message across all talks was that advertising was changing (yes, the very exploited word 360 degree solutions) and press is no longer going to be the lead discipline for communication. In my forthcoming posts I shall share some more learnings from the sessions.

The set-up was rather impressive and AAAI should be commended for all the effort put in to make such a successful event.

• Goafest was on twitter too but no updates after the first day’s breakfast session.
• Food was very nice with elaborate set and was nice to see some local cuisine too.
• Wi-Fi service was provided by Microsoft but I would have been happier if they had a bigger cyber cafe.
• There was a Bluetooth information set-up however it didn’t seem to send out the necessary hourly updates.
• The sessions were primarily based on strategy and planning. I believe the creative guys would have loved to see some talks on design too.
• Client participation was limited and I think it would be interesting to see more of them to come, see the award winning work and get a feel of some international learning at the sessions.
• It was impressive to see the media teams of campaign India and exchange4media churn out overnight newsletters updating the delegates of the previous day’s happenings, soundbites from the who’s who of advertising and snapshots of the various activities.

The event was organised on a lovely beach and the location provided an excellent opportunity for photography. I am quite happy with the results. See the entire photo set on flickr.