Standup comedian Varun Thakur hosted the 11th Mirchi KAAN Awards last Thursday, organised by one of India’s premier radio networks.

Radio Mirchi picked the theme ‘Mute the Cliches’ and attracted over 250 entries from 36 agencies across 20 categories.

Scarecrow Communications emerged as the ‘Agency of the Year’, with a total of six awards, including five Gold and one Bronze.

JWT Mumbai bagged two gold, two silver and three bronze awards.

Linen- A Lintas Group Company, walked away with a total of 11 awards, including four silver and seven bronze.

Last year’s agency of the year, Ogilvy & Mather, bagged two silver and one bronze award.

Some of the big names of the ad and corporate world such Josy Paul, Pops, Sajan Raj Kurup, Rekha Nigam, Sunil Lulla, Sanjay Tripathi, Gaurav Seth and Sripad Nadkarni were present.

Scarecrow Communications also won the ‘Crystal Award’ and ‘Best Radio Creative of the Year – Client’s Choice’ for the Nitco Tiles radio spot captioned ‘Pinkesh’.

Kapil Tammal, Manish Bhatt, Raghu Bhat and Sarvesh Raikar walked away with the ‘Radio Writer of the Year’ award.

NITCO Ltd. was honoured with the title of ‘Client of the Year’.

Sounds Good Production won ‘Excellence in Production’ while Madison Media Pinnacle won the ‘Best use of Radio as a Medium’ for Cadbury Celebrations – Songs for Sisters campaign.

At a regional level, Kerala-based Radio Mango won 2 bronze awards.

The Mirchi KAAN Awards was introduced in 2004 to celebrate creativity in the challenging field of radio advertising.

GG Jayanta, National Marketing Head, ENIL (Radio Mirchi), said: “We are extremely delighted to see the turnout of our initiative in acknowledging the potential of radio. The surge in participation is a testament to the acceptance of radio as an important medium in creative communication.”

This year’s jury included eminent creative personalities such as Josy Paul, Prathap Suthan, Agnello Dias, Anurag Agnihotri, Priti Nair, Amit Akali, Manohar Nayak, Tista Sen, Rekha Nigam , Prateek Bharadwaj & Tapas Sen.