Ahead of the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity 2019, we are back with our 'Cannes Contender' series.
The premise is:
How much time really does a Cannes juror get to understand a case or piece of work s/he hasn't come across before?
Too little. It's up to us to help them get acquainted with the good work prior. We present here entries from Indian/South Asian agencies that their creators believe will be in contention for Lions at the 2019 International Festival of Creativity.
WATConsult has eight such entries.
Give Subtitles to Suicide
This campaign was launched for Suicide Prevention India Foundation, an NGO, to raise awareness around the increasingly suicide rates in India.
The campaign focuses on the importance of identifying suicidal signs among the near and dear ones, as most of the people fail to identify these signs, while some who understand, don't know how to deal with them.
Launched digitally, the campaign leverages the popular 'subtitles' feature on YouTube and Facebook.
Thanks a Dot
The campaign was launched for SBI Life Insurance in association with Women’s Cancer Initiative - Tata Memorial Hospital, to empower the women of India by educating them about early lump detection through simple self-examination techniques.
An easy-to-use self-training module to detect the early signs of lump formation can be ordered free of cost through SBI Life’s corporate website.
Launched in multiple phases, the campaign has a string of videos of featuring the ‘Real Life Real Story’ of breast cancer survivor and activist. This was later followed by a rural activity wherein they conducted workshops to and learn to use the kits.
Powerless Queen
This campaign was launched in association with Nanhi Kali, an NGO that aims to provide primary education to underprivileged girl children in India. Chess originated in India in the 6th Century and in the game of Chess, the ‘Queen’ plays a vital role, while in India the women, who are ‘Queens’ are the least powerful. They are not allowed their basic right to education which leads to them being powerless.
An online chess game which was rolled out as a #PowerlessQueen and challenge across the countryto create awareness about the plight of women in our country and generate donations for the education of underprivileged girls by Nanhi Kali.
The campaign was supported by International Chess players including World Rapid Chess Champion - Viswanathan Anand, Hungarian Woman Grandmaster - Anna Rudolf, Hungarian Woman Grandmaster and Ambassador of Chess and Education UN Planet 50-50 Champion - Judit Polgar, Two-time United States Women Champion - Jennifer Shahade, Four-time Dutch Chess Champion - Anish Giri and Five-time Danish Chess Champion and current coach to World number one Magnus Carlsen - Heine Nielsen.
It garnered donations of 40,000 hours of education for underprivileged girls.
Mind Your Language
This campaign was carried out for Racold, India’s most trusted brand of water heaters from the house of Ariston Thermo. The aim was to raise sales for the brand and for the same, an interesting approach was taken, leveraging Amazon Marketing Service.
India is home to 22 major languages with multiple dialects and it was observed that customers, especially from tier 2 & 3 towns, speak in a certain local dialect and thus their literal pronunciations of English words sound different. As a result, customers also type as they speak which often leads to spelling mistakes.
Tapping into the same, the Ecommencify (WATConsult’s E-Commerce vertical) team created a unique campaign using wrongly spelled keywords; like the word ‘Geyser’ which was often misspelled into multiple variations like ‘Gijar’, ‘Geezar’, 'Geezara" etc. More than 526 misspelled keywords were used to fulfil this additional demand of greater than 3.5 MN searches over a quarter.
This resulted in a return on the actual spend of 16X and it did not stop just there; the team inserted these keywords into each and every product listing on Amazon (through catalog keywords insertion activity) ensuring long term benefits for Racold.
Kids Not For Sale
This campaign was launched for Save the Children NGO, in association with Snapdeal to create awareness about the problem of child trafficking in India. A teaser campaign was launched portraying an ‘Amazing Kids Sale’ on Snapdeal which lead to a hard hitting campaign that highlights stories of children who are sold for prostitution, kidnapped at birth, made to work in unhealthy conditions, drugged for organ trafficking, or forced to beome combatants.
Beat the Crave
This campaign was launched for Marico’s Saffola’s new product Saffola Active Slimming Nutri-Shake. The campaign is a first-ever audio driven digital initiative that aims to distract the audience from unhealthy food cravings.
The campaign conducted an array of social media activities on various platforms, along with a microsite, that allowed users to visit and distract themselves whenever their craving struck, thus enabling them to maintain their diet plan.
The microsite had multiple audio skits and was also available on WhatsApp to encourage people attain their fitness goals. While each audio skit was crafted to help people distract from their cravings, it also allowed them to learn the psyche behind these cravings and provides solutions to avoid them.
The campaign featured several personalities from different walks of life who were roped in to join the ‘Beat the Crave’ wave.
Kaala Teeka
Almost 174 children go missing everyday and around 10 lakh children go missing every year in India and almost half of them remain untraced. Most of the children go missing from rural areas.
Unfortunately, looking for a missing child requires time, manpower and resources, and India as a nation falls short on all of those especially in the absence of a National Missing Persons repository. Also interstate police co-ordination in India is extremely poor and hence many children remain untraced forever. Action Aid (an international NGO) is committed to preventing child trafficking and wanted to help protect children in a non-intrusive manner. They wanted to look for a way to track the child through GPS such that it could also facilitate inter-state police co-ordination and thus help bring back missing children. A key challenge that needed to be tackled was the strong belief in superstitions and the suspicion towards technology among rural people especially where their children were concerned.
Raksha ki Choodiyan
Women are considered as impure/unclean during the time of menstruation. There is taboo and shame associated with periods and this creates a strong cultural restriction forbidding conversations between men and women on periods. This culture of shame and silence makes access to sanitary hygiene more difficult as women do not always have the means necessary (cost is a concern) and men are not aware of problems faced by women. Even if men want to help there is immense awkwardness in broaching the subject. Today, only 24% of India’s 350 million menstruating women and girls use sanitary napkins to manage their menses. Aakar, an NGO and Anandi (An affordable sanitary napkin brand) wanted to break the silence around menstruation and provide knowledge/guidance to masses, especially adolescent girls. The enterprise’s core objective was to sample in conservative rural areas and also change the mindset of both men and women towards menstruation and use of sanitary napkins.
Nearly 59% of CMOs expect that in the next five years, their revenues will come from products, services, or businesses that don’t yet exist, finds Dentsu's 2024 CMO Navigator survey.