Day 3 of Goafest 2026 opened with an increasingly familiar question confronting the advertising industry: if brands are building in-house capabilities, AI is accelerating production and creators are shaping culture faster than agencies, what exactly becomes the agency’s role?
Across packed conference halls in Goa, conversations repeatedly circled back to the same fault lines — speed versus craft, trust versus traffic, measurement versus meaning and scale versus originality. While technology remained central to many discussions, the larger concern underlying the day’s agenda was less about tools and more about relevance.
By the festival’s final day, the event evolved into something broader than an industry showcase. It had become a forum for advertising leaders grappling publicly with structural changes reshaping agencies, media companies and brands alike.
Agencies lose monopoly over creativity
The day began with ‘The Client Who Also Became the Agency’, powered by Hindustan Times. The panel brought together Raj Kamble, founder and CCO of Famous Innovations; Gaurav Ramdev, CMO - India and South Asia at Visa; Ajay Kakar, head-corporate branding at Adani Group; Chandan Mendiratta, chief brand officer of Zepto; and Harsh Deep Chhabra, head-strategy and new business at Sony Pictures Networks India. Rohit Ohri, founder of Ohriginal, moderated the discussion.
The session explored a shift that has accelerated across global marketing ecosystems over the past decade: brands increasingly building internal creative, content and production capabilities once outsourced almost entirely to agencies.
Kamble argued that the distinction between agencies and in-house teams ultimately comes down to culture rather than structure.
“The biggest difference between agencies and in-house teams is culture. Agencies bring outside perspective, debate, challenge and creative friction, while many brands build in-house teams for cost efficiency and tighter control,” he said.
He added that “creative excellence thrives when brands and agencies work as true partners, and strong agency culture encourages disagreement, experimentation, and bold thinking.”
Ramdev framed in-housing as a response to the speed of modern culture itself. “In-housing is driven by the need for speed, agility, and cultural relevance, as modern brands must react to culture and consumer behaviour in real time,” he said.
He noted that long-term strategic campaigns now coexist alongside rapid-response content systems, forcing marketers to balance consistency with constant adaptation.
“The future operating model will be a hybrid between traditional agencies and agile in-house systems,” Ramdev added.
Kakar suggested brands often internalise work when agencies fail to meet evolving expectations around relevance and execution. “The relationship between brands and agencies should function like a strong partnership built on mutual value,” he said. “Brands move work in-house when agencies fail to meet expectations around speed, relevance, or execution.”
His comments reflected a wider industry recalibration. Agencies are no longer competing solely against other agencies, but increasingly against clients’ own internal ecosystems.
Mendiratta described Zepto as operating more like a creator brand than a conventional advertiser. “Zepto’s in-house model is built for agility and real-time cultural relevance, where social media comments and consumer behaviour inspire campaigns within minutes,” he said.
“The brand operates like a content creator brand, celebrating multiple cultural moments and micro-occasions through highly frequent, trend-driven campaigns.” He added that “brand culture cannot be outsourced.”
Chhabra reflected on how in-housing evolved during his earlier stint at Godrej Consumer Products, where campaign volumes expanded dramatically. “It scaled from being among the top 20 advertisers to one of India’s top 4 advertisers, with campaigns increasing from around 10 to nearly 30 per month,” he said.
He further added that in-housing became “critical as business data, growth KPIs, and strategic insights are deeply integrated internally.” His comments highlighted how modern marketing increasingly operates as a business-growth function rather than purely a communication discipline.
Trust overtakes traffic
Attention economics formed the core of another major discussion during LinkedIn’s session, ‘The Great Attention Reset: Because Growth Today Is Built on Trust, Not Traffic’. The panel featured Punit Dharamsi, executive vice president at Association of Mutual Funds in India; Tuhina Pandey, director, APAC Communications and CMO, India and South Asia at IBM; and Jahid Ahmed, senior vice president and head of digital at HDFC Bank. Devajit Roy, head of India, Mid-Market & Growth - Marketing Solutions at LinkedIn, moderated the discussion.
The panel reflected a growing shift away from pure scale metrics towards credibility-led engagement. Dharamsi described financial communication as most effective during moments of personal transition. “Financial communication works best during key life moments like first jobs, marriage, childbirth, retirement, increments, and tax planning,” he said. He noted that AMFI’s communication strategy increasingly focuses on contextual investor education rather than reactive messaging during market volatility.
Pandey argued that relevance now matters more than raw visibility, particularly in B2B environments involving multiple decision-makers. “Relevance matters more than reach in today’s attention economy, especially when influencing modern buying committees across CMOs, CFOs, CEOs, and CIOs,” she said. She also pointed towards a more fundamental shift underway. “AI is becoming both an audience and an intermediary, changing how relevance is measured.”
Ahmed described digital marketing as increasingly moving from interruption-led communication towards intent-driven ecosystems. “Attention today is built on trust, safety, relevance, and frictionless experiences,” he said. “Creator partnerships, peer validation, and educational content are driving both awareness and conversion.”
The discussion reflected a broader market reality. As consumers encounter overwhelming volumes of content daily, trust itself is becoming a competitive differentiator.
The measurement debate intensifies
Questions around accountability and platform dependency surfaced during ‘From Platform-Defined to Brand-Aligned: A Reset in Measurement’, powered by Mediakart and Times Network.
The panel featured Aditi Mishra, CEO of Lodestar; Dhiraj Gupta, co-founder and CTO of mFilterIt; Neha Markanda, chief business officer at ShareChat; and Shahad Anand, business head of Mediakart. Ashish Sehgal, CEO of Times TV Network and CGO for Times Media & Entertainment, moderated the discussion.
Mishra warned against overreliance on platform-generated performance metrics. “Platform metrics should be treated as tools, not the final measure of brand success, since performance data alone cannot define long-term growth,” she said.
Her argument reflected a wider debate emerging across global advertising markets, where brands increasingly question whether platform-defined metrics adequately capture long-term brand impact.
Gupta emphasised independent verification as essential to rebuilding advertiser confidence. “Measurement in advertising is ultimately about trust and validating platform claims, which is why independent third-party verification is essential instead of relying only on platform-defined metrics,” he said. “The maker cannot be the checker, and the checker cannot be the maker.”
Markanda argued for platform-agnostic thinking rooted in user behaviour rather than channel loyalty. “User participation, culture, and context matter as much as impressions,” she said. “Ultimately, success is reflected when ‘user truth’ and ‘brand truth’ align through engagement, sales, and meaningful cultural relevance beyond demographics.”
Anand brought the conversation back to commercial outcomes. “Brands focus on efficiency, money and growth, where measurement exists to support business objectives rather than become the objective itself,” he said. The session reinforced a central tension defining modern marketing: while data availability has expanded dramatically, consensus around what truly constitutes effective measurement remains fragmented.
Creativity under consolidation pressure
One of the sharpest discussions of the day emerged during ‘Scale vs Soul: Creativity in the Age of Agency Consolidation’, powered by CNN News18. The panel featured Ashish Chakravarty, managing partner and CCO at Garage Worldwide; Ashish Khazanchi, managing partner at Enormous; filmmaker Senthil Kumar; and Tarun Bhagat, CMO of PepsiCo. Delshad Irani of Storyboard moderated the discussion.
Chakravarty argued that agencies now operate under fundamentally different pressures depending on their organisational structure. “Legacy agencies and independent setups operate with different pressures, where larger networks often follow global processes while independent agencies build distinct creative cultures,” he said.
Khazanchi described how scale can gradually shift focus towards operational efficiency over creative freedom. “While the industry is becoming more performance-oriented, brands and CMOs still want work that makes them famous, enters culture, and sometimes requires the courage to say ‘no’ to preserve creative integrity,” he said.
Senthil Kumar emphasised that brand ideas remain central to long-term creativity. “Brand ideas build brands while creative ideas come from creative souls,” he said. Although AI can improve efficiency and reduce production costs, he argued that emotional storytelling remains inherently human.
Bhagat challenged the industry’s obsession with agency size itself. “The debate between large and small agencies is often overrated, as great work ultimately depends on people rather than agency size,” he said.
The session reflected broader anxieties surrounding consolidation across global advertising networks. As holding companies prioritise scale and integrated offerings, concerns persist around whether operational complexity risks diluting creative distinctiveness.
AI moves from disruption to infrastructure
AI remained embedded throughout the day’s discussions, though increasingly less as novelty and more as operational reality. During his keynote, ‘Micro and Macro Resets Across Marketing, Advertising and Media’, Rana Barua, group CEO of Havas India, South East Asia and North Asia, argued that the industry is undergoing a structural reset driven by shifting media habits and technological acceleration.
“AI is no longer just a discussion point but an integral part of business, creativity, and everyday workflows,” he said. Barua suggested agencies are increasingly evolving into integrated business and communication partners rather than standalone advertising vendors.
Masterclasses throughout the day reinforced similar themes.
Spotify Advertising explored audio storytelling for “sound-on” audiences, while White Rivers Media focused on Gen Z branding strategies within “Social 3.0”.
YouTube hosted a session on conversion-led video ecosystems, while the Market Research Society of India examined behavioural psychology through ‘The Reset Consumer: Understanding the New Psychology of Choice’.
That session argued consumers often remain paralysed not because of insufficient information, but because available choices feel equally unappealing. Introducing believable “third paths”, visible progress systems and public reinforcement mechanisms, speakers suggested, can significantly influence behavioural change.
Bravery versus bureaucracy
The afternoon sessions turned increasingly philosophical about advertising’s future.
During ‘Resetting for Growth: Why Bravery Is the Only Real Strategy’, powered by MakeMyTrip, Eugene Cheong argued that Indian advertising became globally respected because of creative courage rather than optimisation. He criticised agencies for becoming “asset delivery businesses” constrained by layers of approvals and operational structures.
According to Cheong, traditional agency economics historically depended on a pyramid structure where repetitive execution-heavy work constituted nearly 70% of the business — work now rapidly vulnerable to automation and AI. “The future belongs to agencies driven by talent, courage, intuition, authenticity, and original thinking,” he said.
Similar concerns resurfaced during the AAAI Subhas Ghosal Memorial Lecture, ‘Age of Outrage’, powered by Eenadu.
Santosh Desai, founder and director of Think9 Consumer Technologies, argued that algorithms now reward outrage as emotional currency. “Today’s world is the ‘Age of Outrage,’ where algorithms reward emotional reactions over thought,” he said.
Desai suggested advertising itself helped create identity-driven consumption culture before gradually losing its own storytelling dominance to creators and digital platforms. “While the world has never needed storytelling more, advertising buried creativity under bureaucracy, processes, and award culture,” he said.
Later, Adam Izen, chief awards officer at One Show, echoed similar themes around instinct and originality. “AI cannot replicate human qualities like courage, curiosity, intuition, authenticity, and persistence that truly shape creative excellence,” he said.
Reinvention becomes survival strategy
The final sessions shifted towards longevity and reinvention. Veteran actor Rakesh Bedi reflected on cultural relevance during ‘Yeh Dhurandhar Zindagi - Resetting to Stay Relevant’, presented by News18 in association with Amar Ujala. “Life should be lived through risks, mistakes, and experiences rather than excessive caution,” Bedi said.
Rajiv Dubey of Dabur India Limited later argued that regional culture and hyper-personalisation are fundamentally reshaping advertising strategy.
“Consumers across metros, tier 2, and tier 3 cities now share similar aspirations, making behaviour and intent more important than geography in marketing,” he said.
Ashish Khazanchi returned to the importance of conviction during ‘Rewiring the Mind: Why Fearless Creativity Wins’. “One of the biggest reasons bold ideas never get executed is because teams start second-guessing clients, bosses, and market reactions before the work is even made,” he said. “Safe advertising may sustain brands, but extraordinary impact comes from taking risks and challenging category conventions.”
