After a two-year gap, the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity will be hosting an on-ground event in 2022.
Global creative work will be celebrated from the industry through its red carpet awards nights between 20-24 June.
As always, Campaign India will lead the charge from this region by showcasing all of India's entries to the festival through our 'Cannes Contenders' series.
This is based on the premise that Cannes jurors don’t get enough time to scrutinise and deliberate a piece of work they haven’t really come across before. This series is a way of acquainting them with the good work from India and South Asia before their judging stint. And of course, to acquaint the rest of the industry with work from this region which is competing at the Cannes Lions this year.
Kinnect has three such entries:
Brand: HDFC Bank
Entry title: Add An Ad 3.0
HDFC Bank was launching its third annual shopping festival called ‘festive treats’. It offered a bouquet of discounts and offers to customers for their festive shopping. From smartphones to clothes to loans, it had a vast array of offers to communicate and an equally large competition vying for the top-of-mind awareness during the festive season.
Its objective was to encourage Indians to avail HDFC Bank offers on card purchases and loans. Having successfully done this for the past 2 years, Kinnect set out to make it a hat-trick of standing out from the crowd by ‘adding an ad’, this time on YouTube. Through social listening, they identified that while watching vlogs and even on zoom, audiences were eyeing and discussing objects in the background. Moreover, these items had a higher recall than the actual content. They found an uncontested advertising gold mine - the background.
The products that HDFC Bank had festive discounts on were naturally spotted in the background of YouTube vloggers’ videos. So in their next vlog, instead of talking about the Festive Treats’ offers, they added an ad on the products in their background. They directed the viewer to buy what their eye spied without interrupting the video. All with a simple arrow pointing to a YouTube information card.
Leveraging these YouTube info cards, they showcased the vast range of discounts available through HDFC Bank's Festive Treats. At its heart, all was an ad that didn’t intrude on the creators’ storytelling while driving higher conversions for the campaign.
Brand: TVS Raider
Entry title: Fight for what’s right
Early evidence during the pandemic suggested that domestic violence complaints had risen by 131%. Violence against women is deeply entrenched and widely prevalent in India, fueled by patriarchy and toxic masculinity. Most bike brands try to embody an outdated concept of masculinity in their positioning to appeal to male audiences. TVS Raider did not want to fuel this trend. They wanted to take a stand against the prevalent toxic masculinity in Indian society. Men have a unique, empathetic relationship with bikes and cars, such that a small scratch can cause them mental distress. When men can feel pain towards the harm of an inanimate object, why do they remain silent spectators to the brutal assaults on women? On 25th November, the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women, they launched a video that showed the brand-new bike being brutally assaulted.
Brand: SOS Children Village (also entered by FCB India)
Entry title: Chatpat
Kinnect and FCB India came together to create an influencer, #chatpatkagyaan, to help childcare NGO - SOS Children Village in creating awareness and helping it raise funds and build awareness about the homeless and destitute. This social movement has been fairly successful, with multiple brands coming on board. On Children’s Day '21, a 10-year-old boy - Chatpat, from the streets of Mumbai, shares ‘Gyaan’ videos around the quirks he learned on the streets. The videos feature him and his friends, all of whom live on the streets. While his videos instantly started winning hearts, there was an underlying message of the harsh reality of a 10-year-old living and surviving on the streets that got noticed. The influencer campaign has helped the NGO raise funds and increase awareness, but it has also helped brands get the right kind of recognition and appreciation from the public for their active participation in a social cause.
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.