India had a great run at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity in 2022, with a total of 47 metals.
We start the build-up to the 2023 edition, with our annual Cannes Contenders series.
Campaign India aims to 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.
Leo Burnett has six such entries.
Airtel - 175 Replayed
In 1983, Kapil Dev single-handedly scored 175 runs in a crucial cricket World Cup match, creating a world record.
But a BBC strike deprived us of this historic moment.
That's where Airtel, India's leading telecom brand, stepped in. Airtel decided to recreate this match in minute detail and show it to people in a never-seen-before way with 5G.
There were no records of this match, except three images. So everyone who witnessed this match in 1983 was interviewed, and more than a 1,000 data points gathered which helped Airtel recreate the same era, same stadium and same environment. With Oscar winning VFX studio double negative, Kapil Dev too was de-aged to his 1983 self.
The way this match was shown to people was as epic as the match itself. In a specially created 5G arena, people saw this match for the first time, with 5G enhanced viewing. They could check the match out in multiple angles, with 360 degree in stadium view and real time shot analysis.
India finally got to see a lost, glorious moment of its past along with a glimpse of the future.
Oreo - #BringBack2011
In India, cricket is not a game but it is a religion. And that’s the reason the cricket world cup is the super bowl of India. But Oreo had a problem. It was not a sponsor, no big media budgets and not even legally allowed to use ‘World Cup’ in their advertising.
But we did find a strange coincidence. Oreo launched in India in 2011 and India won the world cup in 2011 or was it a mere coincidence? That’s why with another World Cup this year, we decided to launch Oreo for the first time ever, again! With the hope that India will win the world cup, again. And who else would have been the right choice to launch Oreo in India, again than former World Cup winning captain MS Dhoni. He asked India to #BringBack2011 and the entire India joined in the movement.
P&G Whisper - The Missing Chapter
In India, periods have been a taboo subject for centuries. Society, schools and even mothers don’t talk about it. With no information on how to manage their periods, 23 million girls end up dropping out of school. Whisper, India’s largest sanitary napkin brand, had worked with schools for years to normalise menstruation. But we needed a solution that would match the scale of the problem.
On closer examination, we realised that the national school board, bound by the same taboo, had never included a chapter on menstruation. So we created The Missing Chapter, a red paper that explained the simple biology of periods. We put the chapter on the front page of newspapers, on prime-time news, and painted it on school walls in every state. India lent its voice and read the chapter on social media. Ministers, celebrities, educators joined in. We petition the government to include the chapter in curriculum. In a historic decision, the government committed to add the chapter on periods in school textbooks.
Burger King - The Great Celebrity Hack
The most talked-about campaign by Burger King India.
Burger King wanted a big Bollywood celebrity for the launch of its Rs. 50 Stunner Menu. But selling burgers for as cheap as Rs. 50 meant low to no budget for marketing. Or that’s what we wanted everyone to believe. We partnered with Bollywood's biggest superstar and India's heartthrob, Hrithik Roshan to trick an entire nation into believing that we got him to promote The Stunner Menu without him knowing. We put up a video on the internet for the audience to witness us disguised as the paparazzi, snapping Mr. Roshan against an image of The Stunner Menu. The video of our 'sneaky act' was distributed on social media which got netizens to like, share, and comment uncontrollably. Overnight, 'The Great Celebrity Hack' became the most talked-about campaign by Burger King India, causing millions of Indians to line up outside our stores, waiting to try the controversial Stunner Menu.
Lay’s - The Biochar Project
To feed India’s rising population, farmers need to clear their fields of stubble within days for the next crop cycle. The quickest and most effective way, is to simply burn it- leading to burning of +27mn tonnes of stubble every year in north Indian states alone.
While the auspicious nature of fire makes it a culturally acceptable practice, stubble burning emits +160mn tonnes of greenhouse gases, choking the entire north of India.
We couldn’t stop the burning, but we could help farmers burn stubble, the right away.
We partnered with Punjab Agricultural University and created an earthen kiln for controlled burning. The incomplete combustion of stubble creates Biochar- a charred, carbon-rich soil amendment which not only remediates stubble burning but also redresses its impact by creating a carbon rich bio-fertilizer.
Through our agronomists, we are educating not only our farmers in Punjab but also their communities of young and old alike about Biochar and its positive impact on yield, soil, income and environment- ensuring both old farmers and the coming generation adopts sustainable farming practices.
Lay’s - Smart Farm
Unpredictable climate change has led to Indian farmers losing $5.1Bn worth of crop, since Indian agricultural practices traditionally follow predictable seasonal patterns. Tackling this requires precise monitoring of every crop, every single day. But farmlands in India are fragmented and spread over large distances of 20 kms; making every day monitoring impossible.
Our strategy was simple: to use historical data from provided by our decade long partnership with farmers, and provide predictive insights to transform traditional Indian agricultural practices to climate-smart algorithmically-mediated practices.
Partnering with Cropin, an AgTech provider we created Smart Farm- a real-time monitoring system using satellite-imagery and remote-sensing to create an early warning system. These early warnings generated are simplified for farmers as colour codes and shared on their smartphones- empowering them with predictive intelligence. This helps reduce their response time and suggests strategic interventions before they face irreplaceable damage.
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