Meet Indie Awards Judge Megha Sharma

Last month, The Indie Awards announced its first wave of judges for the 2019 competition. Aiming to raise the profile of the independent agency sector, the awards celebrates the talent and creativity of indie agencies. Here, The Indie Awards chats to judge Megha Sharma, founder and CEO at ADRIFT Communications and Influencer Marketing - a PR agency which offers insight and data driven communication services to global and Indian clients. Megha has over 18 years of PR experience and was previously associate managing director, Cohn & Wolfe and senior vice-president, Fleishman Hillard.

Q> What makes the Indie Awards different?

Megha Sharma> The Indie Awards are the biggest awards exclusively for independent agencies. Independent Agencies are the way of the future and can offer creative, specialist services that large firms cannot. The Indie Awards will give the much needed boost and recognition to the excellent work that independent agencies are doing worldwide.

Q> What makes a campaign award-worthy and what elements will you be looking for in the winning work?

Megha> Boldly creative; simplicity in messaging; disruption (breaking patterns/barriers/innovative use of technology) and overall impact of the campaign will be something that I will be looking for when selecting the winning campaigns. 

Q> Why do you think the Indie Awards are important?

Megha> The Indie Awards are important because they celebrate the spirit of ‘Independence’ – the spirit of creative, independent work and the spirit of independent agencies. And independent agencies are the future of 'Agency World.'

Q> What common themes do you expect to see across the entries, and particularly in the winning work?

Megha> Media Neutral campaigns – campaigns using multiple mediums (e.g. direct marketing, PR, social media, advertising) to communicate their message effectively. 

So, a campaign may not be only one medium anymore such as only PR or digital, which has been the way campaigns have been thought of before.

Social media friendly campaigns – with consumers increasingly taking on to social media and actually driving content, clients are changing their approach/ content and messaging to suit the ‘new-age’ medium. Likewise, agencies are devising their campaigns keeping social-media channels in mind.

Greater share of paid media versus earned media: Paid media is no longer a ‘taboo’ in the communications world and I expect to see a greater share of paid media versus earned media in campaigns especially in PR

Q> The Public Good category is new for this year. Do you think great advertising can truly instigate real and lasting change in society for the better?

Megha> Public Good is the “Human Face/side” of a brand and there is a greater need to communicate this side of the brand than ever. Great advertising and communication (PR, digital) truly has the potential to communicate a great CSR story for a brand and in-turn drive brands to do more good for the society – which is great. Over the past few years, we have seen some of the bigger brands give greater push to CSR work and campaigns and that’s all because of the way storytelling has evolved in this category. The addition of the new category is welcome and I look forward to seeing some stellar work in this category.