Goafest 2025 to feature Goafest Village, Advertising Plays, masterclasses

The 18^th edition of the three-day Goafest 2025 festival (May 21-23, 2025) scheduled to commence tomorrow at Taj Cidade de Goa Heritage and Horizon in Goa is expected to present multiple new formats and themes this year. Marking a departure from the common industry event formats that centre on speaker sessions and panel discussions, this Goafest 2025 will feature Goafest Village, a multi-stage zone that draws its inspiration from the Cannes Festival. The event will offer multiple simultaneous experiences including Advertising Plays, Advertising Rocks, and GoaFresh.

Newly introduced this year, Advertising Plays will consist of sports and wellness activities. According to Mohit Joshi, co-chair of the Goafest 2025 organising committee and chief executive officer of Havas Media Network India, Advertising Plays will provide scope for everyone to find relevant themes for themselves. “We are doing a lot of sports and wellness activities like Beach Walkathon, and Yoga by the Beach, among others. The return on experience is going to be an important theme this time,” Joshi told Campaign.

This year’s festival theme, ‘IGNITE ____’ assumes an open-ended approach, inviting speakers and audience members to fill in the blanks with diverse possibilities—differing from the prescriptive themes of the previous editions. Participants can define what they want to ignite—for instance, innovation, sustainability, or social impact.

Another attraction, the Masterclass sessions will focus on specialised niche areas. The participating experts include Nick Eagleton from D&AD, Senthil Kumar from VML, Krishnendu Dutta from Ipsos, Jayesh Moorjani from Google, Jayant Rajan from Meta, Amogh Dusad from Ogilvy, and Debapriya Dutt and Karuna Singh from Earthday.org.

GoaFresh, another key initiative this year, will offer students from premier institutes like MICA, SIMC, Miami Ad School, and Loyola College an opportunity to participate in special mentoring sessions with industry experts. Advertising Rocks, which encourages participants from India’s advertising, media, and marketing community to showcase their musical talent, will also be returning this year. More than 10 participants will perform over two nights at Goafest 2025.

This year’s speakers will include Rishad Tobaccowala, Youri Guerassimov of Marcel, Prasoon Joshi of McCann Worldgroup India, Amarjit Singh Batra from Spotify, Vikram Mehra of Saregama, Karan Bedi from Amazon MX Player India, Tejas Apte from HUL, Ankit Desai from Marico, Arjun Choudhary from Swiggy, and Sanket Prakash Tulangekar from MakeMyTrip. The festival’s power-packed schedule will comprise over 35 speaker sessions, 60 speakers, and 20 masterclasses.

The head coach of India’s international men’s cricket team Gautam Gambhir and Bollywood stars including Kareena Kapoor Khan, Suniel Shetty, Jaideep Ahlawat, and Vijay Varma will be present at the show.

Amazon MX Player will be the Title Sponsor of Goafest 2025, aligning with the event’s broad objective of attracting young advertising talent. Co-hosted by the Advertising Agencies Association of India (AAAI) and The Advertising Club (TAC), the festival is likely to witness an attendance of over 2,000 industry professionals this year.

Jaideep Gandhi, chairman of the Goafest 2025 organising committee and founder of Another Idea, told Campaign that all the industry bodies and associations including IAA, ASCII, IOAA, VAS, and MRSAI, will be present for Goafest 2025.