Mumbai: On the third and final day of Goafest 2026 there was a session ‘Resetting for Growth: Why Bravery Is the Only Real Strategy’, powered by MakeMyTrip.
The session featured Eugene Cheong, Creative Director & Partner, Euge Publishing, who shared his perspectives on the evolving creative landscape and highlighted why courage, experimentation, and unconventional thinking are becoming increasingly critical for brands and agencies navigating a rapidly changing world.
“Indian advertising became a global creative force through bravery, risk-taking, and creative conviction – not safety or optimisation” he said. Cheong argued that agencies are becoming overly process-driven ‘asset delivery businesses,’ where creativity is being suppressed by layers of approvals, bureaucracy, and operational structures. He pointed out that the traditional agency model was built on 10% breakthrough global work,
20% strong culturally impactful work, and 70% repetitive execution-heavy business – a layer now rapidly disappearing because of AI, automation, and in-housing. According to him, the future belongs to agencies driven by talent, courage, intuition, authenticity, and original thinking, because AI can automate execution, but it cannot replicate human creative instinct,” Cheong noted.
Another highlight of the evening was ‘Age of Outrage’ – the AAAI Subhas Ghosal Memorial Lecture, powered by Eenadu. The lecture was delivered by Santosh Desai, Founder & Director, Think9 Consumer Technologies, Author, Columnist, Social Commentator. He further engaged in an interesting fireside chat with Anuraddha SenGupta, Independent journalist and producer.
Reflecting on how advertising helped shape today’s outrage-driven attention economy while simultaneously losing its own cultural relevance, he said, “Today’s world is the ‘Age of Outrage,’ where algorithms reward emotional reactions over thought, making outrage the most powerful emotional currency online. Advertising itself helped create this ecosystem by shifting from selling products to selling identity and teaching people to define themselves through choices, preferences, and rejection.
“While the world has never needed storytelling more, advertising buried creativity under bureaucracy, processes, and award culture just as creators and digital platforms mastered the very storytelling techniques the industry originally invented.”
The festival also featured a keynote session by Adam Izen, Chief Awards Officer – One Show, who shared insights into global creative benchmarks, evolving industry standards, and the growing importance of impactful storytelling and innovation in shaping award-winning work across markets.
Emphasising the future of advertising will belong to agencies driven by creativity, courage, and original thinking rather than operational scale alone, he said, “Indian advertising became a global creative force because of bravery, risk-taking, and creative conviction – not safety, optimisation, or bureaucracy. Agencies today have become overly dependent on processes, approvals, and operational structures, while AI is rapidly eliminating repetitive execution-heavy work that once made up nearly 70% of the traditional agency business. The future belongs to agencies driven by talent, creativity, and instinct, because AI cannot replicate human qualities like courage, curiosity, intuition, authenticity, and persistence that truly shape creative excellence.”
