The thought of creating a world-class award platform for India comes with a vision. I believe that if you create a product that is great, the product will sell and the ‘consumers’ will come, automatically.

I see the story of Abby One Show 2023 as just that; a great product, that then attracted “consumers” in droves.

Let me elaborate.

The Abbys is a 54-year-old brand. It is a brand that has become synonymous with creative excellence. In fact, the Indian advertising industry has grown up to Abby being the most sought-after creative recognition for the industry; that is the advertising, media, and marketing industry.

When you have a leader brand, it is possible that the people behind the brand get complacent, and adopt the “if it ain’t broke” attitude; ‘Once you have made it, let's just keep doing more of the same’. On the contrary, we at The Advertising Club start every year with the question ‘how can we scale even newer highs, this year’. While we believe that we did our very best last year, but what can we do this year which is even better than the last year high?

With this objective in mind, we start the year, every year, by inviting all the constituents of the industry to a town hall, with the sole purpose to hear all the constituents and their feedback and suggestions on every facet of the awards and the award show.

And this became our starting point for the Abby One Show Awards 2023, too. To hear our constituents.

Having done that, in a fast and ever-changing world, it was important for our industry and the Awards to represent this changing world. So, to be and remain ‘World-class’ in an ever-changing world, I think, that was the biggest challenge and brief before us. Therefore, rather than to reinvent the wheel or compete, we decided to collaborate.

Last year, we had done a tie-up with the ‘One Show’, with that in mind. And this partnership has given us a kickstart with world-class practices, world-class processes, world-class guidelines, and a world-class perspective to a world-class award.

Now, if you have got a world-class platform, the next question is, who is judging the awards? I believe that an award is as good as the jury who judges it. For the Creative Abby Awards, we have seven broad categories and this year too, we wanted world-class Jury Chairs for each of these categories. It was critical to have the Jury chaired by world-class leaders of the craft, who are recognised as contemporary and relevant to the world as it stands today, and tomorrow.

This year our platform and product attracted the world's best, as Jury Chair, for the awards. Giants like Mandie van der Merwe, Nick Law and Wesley ter Haar chose to lend their name to the Abby One Show 2023, as a testimonial of it being a world-class platform, and a world-class award show that they wanted to be associated with.

From within India, we chose to desist the temptation to look at the past and repeat names, just from a perspective of people who have chaired Juries in the past. We identified the best of the best as Jury Chair; those who have proved themselves over the years and are yet contemporary, and on the other hand, younger blood that has proven itself in recent years. The youngsters may be young in age, but in experience and the merit of their work, they are as toasted as the best of the best. We also chose as Jury Chair some who went on to be invited as Jury members at this year’s Cannes awards. And we also had Guneet Monga, who did India and her craft proud at the Oscars, just recently.

Diversity and inclusion being a key agenda for us, the Abby One Show 2023, boasted diversity and inclusion in the kinds of agencies and brands that have participated, the variations of delegates, and also at the jury level. Among the 23 Jury Chair, 33 per cent of them were celebrated women.

This year we also decided to bring the spotlight on the youngsters, who have done great work. So, we not only invited young stalwarts as Jury Chair and Jury, but we also created a new award category; the ‘Young Maverick Abby Awards’.

Typically, the agency and campaigns get called out. This new award not only recognises the work and agency, but especially calls out the talent that created the award-winning work. The sole filter for this category is that the work should have been created by talent that is 30 years, or below. Therefore, the new generation of talent gets the recognition and respect that is so richly deserved.  

A great product means having a great platform, acknowledged and certified as world-class, and having great people who are going to be the custodians of the awards. To keep the guardrails within, we also had KPMG, the world-renowned consulting firm, as our auditors.

As I said, if you have a great product, the consumer will come. Let’s look at the attention and interest that the awards attracted, this year.

Let’s first look at the participation, in the form of participating agencies and the entries received. In absolute terms, we received an all time high, on both counts.

To put to perspective the entries received this year, versus the last, we need to remember that the entries received last year were a culmination of three year’s work, due to COVID, versus this year, which is a standalone one-year tally. At the Creative Abbys last year, we had received 2007 entries, being a culmination of three years as against this year, 2282 entries for the year. If you look at it in the context of three years versus one year, it's a quantum leap.

If we look at the participating entities, which include agencies, companies, or media houses, the participating entities last year were 142 for Creative, and this year it is 181. Now as an industry and people who have been in this industry for many years, we may not even remember the name of five, ten, or 40 agencies and if we have 181 participants this year, it tells a story by itself. It was a case of diversity and inclusion. All kinds and sizes of agencies from all disciplines and geographies chose to participate this year. Similarly, when we look at the participation for the Media Abbys, last year 54 agencies participated, wherein this year 63 agencies participated.

A high and testimonial for the Abby One Show 2023 was the fact that three network agencies chose to participate this year, over and above the long tail that we have earned this year.

The Mullen Lowe Lintas Group, that had chosen to stay away from all creative award shows in India, chose the Abby One Show Awards, to make their come back to an Indian award show this year, after a hiatus of around a decade. This year we also won the trust and endorsement of McCann and Wunderman Thompson, who returned after a gap.

Looking back at our success, this year, a key observation and new trend seems to be quality over quantity.

Traditionally, agencies have preferred to enter award shows if and when they have a considerable number of worthy work, so that they have a shot at featuring high on the pecking order of agencies, in the final tally. The likely number of wins and metal seemed important for many agencies, as they decided on whether to participate or not.

This year, given the number of participating agencies and entities, and their number of entries, it is most heartening to note that entities have been selective and happy to enter, even if with a few pieces of work, that they thought is worthy of benchmarking against the best in the industry. Mullen Lowe Lintas chose to participate, even if with only15 entries. Similarly, McCann had 16 entries and Wunderman Thompson had 57 entries this year. This year we also attracted more than 3,000 delegates to the Goafest, where the Abby One Show Awards is hosted.

It’s a high for Abby One Show 2023 that an all-time high of ‘consumers’ have chosen to be associated this year, be it as Jury Chair, Jury, entries, delegates or sponsors. Most importantly, this year saw participation for recognition of work and not volumes of work that anyone has created. With a new mindset that great work needs to be pitted against other great work, with the final tally of metal or pecking order not being their driving force.  

(Ajay Kakar is a Brand and Marketing Strategist, former CMO of Aditya Birla Capital, Co-Chair of the Awards Governing Council of the Abby One Show 2023, and Editorial Consultant to BW Businessworld)