How they moved the needle

Kartikey Kashyap, Financial Express

27 May 2026

Three campaigns took home the Grand Prix awards from Goafest this year: Kansai Nerolac Paints”The Barefoot Journey” by Tribes Commu-nication in the Media category; Mountain Dew’s “Darescore” by Leo in Digital & Technology; and Center fruit (Perfetti Van Melle India)” Kaisi Jeebh Laplapayee”” by Perfetti’s in-house team in the Best Use of Voice/Technology category.

All three were exceptionally creative and scored high on likeability and novelty. There was another common element that tied the three together: How they used creativity to solve real brand problems.

Take PepsiCo’s Mountain Dew Darescore campaign. Nepal’s tourism economy relies heavily on mountaineering, but over 90% of global tourist revenue flows into Mount Everest. As a result, there is overcrowding on Everest, starving the country’s other formidable peaks of income and attention.

Enter Mountain Dew. In partner-ships with the Nepal Tourism Board and the Discovery Channel, the brand built the world’s first algorithmic mountain grading system. Leo aggregated decades of expedition records, terrain complexity maps, seasonal weather hazards, rescue failure rates, and first-hand Sherpa wisdom. They funneled these metrics into an engine and assigned a quantifiable “Dare Score” to individual peaks. This data visually demonstrated that height does not equal danger, giving climbers an scale to gauge terrain toughness.

The genius of the campaign was its consumer utility. Mountain Dew printed smart QR codes on millions of its beverage bottles. When a user scanned the bottle, it unlocked an immersive digital hub, where users could simulate climbs, map out route plans, read real-time weather conditions, and submit expedition inquiries. The campaign took Mountain Dew’s slogan, “Darr Ke Aage Jeet Hai” and algorithmically decoded it for real-world application.

The result: It Swept Goafest 2026 and collected medals across vastly different categories including Integrated, Brand Experience, Social Content, and Video Craft, besides the Grand Prix. “Darescore is a powerful example of how brands are moving from storytelling to measurable participation. For decades, adventure culture celebrated only the final summit. This campaign changed the lens, it quantified courage itself,” says Prabhakar Mundkur, director, advertising & media, Percept. “What made this Grand Prix-worthy was the fusion of technology, gaming logic, data and brand philosophy into one seamless experience.”

If the Darescore campaign embedded data into storytelling, Nerolac chose to stay away from the beaten path. Its “Barefoot Journey” was a hyper-local activation designed by Tribes Communication for Nerolac Perma NoHeat, an acrylic-based, heat-reflective exterior coating. The campaign focused entirely on real-world product performance.

Every summer devotees visit various religious sites and walk barefoot along sweltering walkways or wait in queues on hot concrete floors.

Along with local authorities, the teams coated thewalkways of several high-footfall temples across south-ern India with Nerolac Perma NoHeat paint. The paint reduced the surface temperature of the pathways by up to 15°C offering relief to devotees.

This campaign won the jury over with its simplicity. According to Devangshu Dutta, founder & CEO, Third Eyesight, “Though the campaign might target a small audience, it made an impact by shifting the frame,” Dutta points out. “The campaign turned advertising into lived experience,” Mundkur says. “People didn’t just hear a claim, they felt it. This is media not as interruption, but as empathy.”

For its part, Centre fruit brought back its hoary “Kaisi Jeebh Lapla-payee” tagline using generative AI. Teaming up with WPP, BharatGPT.ai and Google Cloud, Perfetti created voice-based GenAl interactions in local dialects that turned feature phones smart. “What made the experience special was that it felt less like advertising and more like a conversation,” says Gunjan Khetan, director marketing, Perfetti Van Melle. Al was an enabler of accessibility and a tool to build cultural relevance, Khetan adds. “The brilliance lay in how it con-verted a simple sensory reaction -the uncontrollable craving triggered by taste – into a scalable interactive idea. It was playful, memorable and unmistakably Indian. More importantly, it proved that consistency in -brand codes, when combined with fresh execution, can become a formidable creative asset,” Mundkur says.

There you have it. Winning creative awards is validating, but solving the client’s problems through that creativity remains the bellringer.

(Published in Financial Express)