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Dentsu Creative India Team Speaks On The Historic Year At Cannes Lions

In the recently concluded Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity, VMLY&R India's 'The Killer Pack' campaign for Maxx Flash bagged a Grand Prix at the Health & Wellness Lions. The agency’s commerce division picked up a Gold Lion in the Creative Commerce category for Unilever’s ‘Smart Fill’ campaign. These big wins at a global platform like Cannes Lions is an indication that the agency is ramping up its capabilities to create more future-ready, cutting-edge work.
For instance, 'The Killer Pack' campaign for Maxx Flash which fetched the agency a Grand Prix may look like a purpose-led initiative but it has more layers to it which made it stand out.

Here’s what the campaign focused on:

In India, garbage collection points act as major breeding grounds for diseases like dengue and malaria, while mosquito repellent coils are only used to fight mosquitoes inside homes, Maxx Flash and VMLY&R decided to change that. The mosquito repellent brand introduced The Killer Pack, with 100% biodegradable packaging lined with 5% Active Probiotic Bacillus thuringiensis, which kills mosquito larvae when disposed of in garbage dumps, dustbins, and stagnant water, which, the company claims, helps to break the cycle.

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With ‘Smart Fill’, which was launched as Hindustan Unilever’s (a subsidiary of Unilever) in-store vending model for its home care products, VMLY&R Commerce is trying to move sustainability narrative to actual practice. The consumer giant has plans to expand ‘Smart Fill’ machines across prominent retailers and modern trade outlets in India. To access products from the Smart Fill machine, consumers can either use their old empty bottles or purchase a ‘Smart Fill’ bottle from the store at a nominal price.

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Storyboard18 caught up with Mukund Olety, CCO, VMLY&R India and Arpan Jain, ECD, VMLY&R Commerce India, to dig into the making of these campaigns and the advertising trends that will shape the rest of 2022.

Read on:

<strong>VMLY&R India won Lions in categories like Creative Commerce and Creative Business Transformation. It’s putting India high up on the creative world map in categories it didn't have much presence in. What do clients really want from award winning agencies like yours?</strong>

Jain: Our winning campaigns are great examples of purpose powered creativity, which is what we stand for as an agency. Brands are looking for ideas that have the power to drive business transformation, while bringing about real change in society. It’s about adding value to a brand by adding value to its consumers’ lives.

<strong>What according to you makes Unilever’s ‘Smart Fill’ campaign a winning initiative?</strong>

Jain: The beauty of Smart Fill is that it stems from the Indian mindset of resourcefulness. India has a culture of thrift. Unlike the West, trade-offs are expected with every action. People carry their own bags to supermarkets to avoid paying for carry bags. It isn’t that they cannot afford a Rs5 carry bag on a shopping bill of Rs5000, but they do not want to be wasteful.

India also has a cultural practice of repurposing used packaging. Cookie tins are reused as sewing kits, soda bottles are converted into spray bottles.

So, it’s not just about providing an alternative to new plastic packaging but creating a strong ‘value’ connotation to drive mass adoption of the model.

<strong>What do people not know about a campaign like 'The Killer Pack' for Maxx Flash that picked up a Grand Prix this year?</strong>

Olety: The toughest part was executing the idea. While our client bought into the idea, we had to go through a whole lot of hurdles before we got our hands on the bacterial strain. It was not just difficult to access but also difficult to transport. And once we had the bacteria, we tried different ways to infuse it into the packaging. After multiple tries, a smart solution was found. We used a debossed design in which the bacteria was placed. We also managed to infuse it into the ink. That made the pack doubly potent. The bacteria in the ink releases immediately when in a moist environment and the bacteria in the debossed section starts to work as the pack breaks down.

<strong>In terms of the work at Cannes, what did you pick up as some of the key advertising trends that will shape the rest of the year?</strong>

Jain: You would have noticed the shift from creative e-commerce to creative commerce at Cannes this year. Creative commerce brings the element of conversion to brand experiences, making sure we give customers the option to buy online or in the physical space. This shift was to highlight the different emerging areas of commerce and it will broaden the horizons of creativity for business and talent, for years to come.

There was talk of aiming to make every ad a green ad by 2030, and I couldn’t agree more with the speakers. The future is all about sustainable innovation and we’re going to see a lot more.

We saw some really interesting campaigns that were set inside games in the metaverse. I look forward to seeing more brandverses come alive with fun interactions and unique experiences. If your campaign can entertain, enlighten and encourage purchases at the same time, you’ve struck gold!

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Making of VMLY&R India’s Grand Prix winning campaign

P&G is among the global marketers that has been pushing the purpose-driven agenda for a while now. In India, the company’s brands such as Ariel and Whisper have been creating purpose-led advertising and launching several marketing initiatives that tie into that higher-order purpose. Menstrual hygiene brand Whisper through its #KeepGirlsInSchool movement has been encouraging conversations that will help in normalize period talk.

To build on this, Leo Burnett India helped Whisper identify ‘The Missing Chapter’, a film to illustrate how a girl’s lack of period education contributes to her missing school days, a situation exacerbated by the glaring absence of period education in Indian textbooks.

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The campaign got India its first Grand Prix in the Sustainable Development Goals category at the recently concluded Cannes Lions Festival Of Creativity.

Beyond the film, the brand also looked for 28 art styles specific to the geography of each state and the agency worked with local artists to create custom hand-drawn paintings centred around ‘The Missing Chapter’ on periods. Hyper-localized in 28 different languages, slogans with catchy lines were crafted to bust period myths along with a 3-step visual aid on how to use a pad. These paintings have been put up on school and village walls – a place no girl can miss seeing them.

In a conversation with Storyboard18, Akhil Meshram, senior director and business head feminine care, Indian Subcontinent – Procter & Gamble, talks about why the campaign was a success, the results, and how brands can be a force for good and a force for growth. Read on:

<strong>What according to you made ‘The Missing Chapter’ a winning campaign at a global platform like Cannes Lions?</strong>

Before talking about The Missing Chapter, it is important to understand the context around menstrual hygiene in India. Surprisingly, out of a total of 40 crore menstruating women in India, less than 20 percent use sanitary pads. Even in urban areas, this number only goes up to 52 percent - which means, nearly half the women, even in urban India, are still using unhygienic methods of menstrual protection, such as dirty cloth pieces or even rags, husk, newspaper, and mud, amongst many others – all of which lead to a host of health issues.

This begs the question as to what it takes to improve this statistic. Awareness and acceptance of the right hygienic practices is the only way to help achieve menstrual hygiene and safeguard women’s health. One challenge to this that was always staring right in our faces, was a missing chapter in the curriculum of our school system across the country.

The way we see it, the campaign film and subsequent outreach sparked a conversation across the country on the need of a specific chapter on menstrual hygiene – in a country where periods are viewed as taboo and rarely spoken above hushed tones. The Missing Chapter was able to get people to think for how long the Chapter will be missing from the curriculum – a Chapter that could help girls be unstoppable even during their period days. The fact that the right stakeholders recognized the gap and questioned it as well was the turning point for the campaign.

With that in mind, we feel the campaign received recognition at a global platform like Cannes Lions simply because it went multiple steps beyond just a campaign film and helped change mindsets right at the grassroot. The wall paintings were an important aspect here to ensure people had a visual aid to relate to in their local culture – making the red paper a significant icon for people to link the need for The Missing Chapter in the curriculum.

<strong>What does this win mean for brand Whisper?</strong>

Whisper began the journey to normalize menstruation in India more than 25 years ago; at the time the number of women using hygienic sanitary protection was less than 1 crore. Today, this number is 10X that and continues to grow. When we started the #KeepGirlsInSchool movement in 2019, the aim was to normalise the conversation about menstrual health and address how young girls and their families don’t need to look at periods as taboo. This year, we scaled up the movement by introducing The Missing Chapter, which was focused on asking for mandatory inclusion of period education in the school curriculum.

This win is a testament to our vision of ensuring that 100% of all adolescent girls in the country are educated on menstrual hygiene so that no girl is forced to drop out of school due to her period. The recognition we have received just helps us push towards achieving our vision through innovative interventions like raising awareness about The Missing Chapter and attracting attention from the top bodies in India towards this pressing need.

<strong>What were the key results of the campaign?</strong>

With The Missing Chapter, we wanted to paint the nation red. Till date, this initiative has already reached 30 million people through various touchpoints from the outreach.

This time around for us, it was very important to reach the grass roots and drive this awareness in the most distinct and receptive manner. The wall arts, which replicated the red chapter from the campaign film, were spread across 28 Indian states, incorporating the unique language and art style possessed by each state. We put the chapter on rural school walls, and along school routes, so no girl could possibly miss it.

Along with the campaign, Whisper continues to work towards teaching as many girls as possible about periods, before they can drop out of school. By the end of this year, period education will reach over 80,000 partner schools. Till date, we have educated more than 5.5 crore girls on menstrual hygiene and have pledged to reach an additional 71 lakh girls by the end of this year, which will double our impact in the next two years.

<strong>Purpose is at the heart of P&G’s brands’ narrative. What’s the biggest learning from this strategy?</strong>

As P&G, we truly believe that our brands can be a force for good and a force for growth. As a brand, Whisper has always stood against taboos around periods – and that has been at the core of not just our previous campaigns like Touch The Pickle, Sit Improper, and Meri Life Mere Rules, but also in the previous iterations of the #KeepGirlsInSchool movement.

We feel it is important for a brand to stand for something – something that consumers relate to and where we can contribute to improve certain aspects of the socio-economic landscape . Therefore, purpose takes center-stage for us because it is important, we use our voice to help bring about change that consumer want to see in their life or in society. Our objective at Whisper is to ensure that young girls not only stay in school but work towards achieving their dreams without the limitation of periods.




The making of P&G's Cannes Lions Grand Prix-winner ‘The Missing Chapter’

Five years ago, when Indian creative directors came home from the Oscars of advertising they had a bag full of inspiration on how to crack the digital code. Cut to 2022. They are returning with a suitcase full of Lions for their cutting-edge tech-driven work.

Dentsu Webchutney created history by winning three Grand Prix in a single year at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity for Vice Media’s campaign ‘The Unfiltered History Tour’. The agency also grabbed a much-coveted Titanium Lion, a category that celebrates game-changing work. The campaign has also become India's highest-ever awarded work in Cannes Lions' history.

Dentsu Creative India also won the prestigious Agency of the Year title.

Storyboard18 asked Ajay Gahlaut, group chief creative officer, Dentsu Creative, what makes ‘The Unfiltered History Tour’ a winning campaign. He believes the way the campaign has used creativity and tech to question history has got people interested. Also, its subversive nature has added to its appeal. “The fact that one is bypassing the ‘official’ narrative of the British Museum and accessing an alternate view through technology is very exciting. The campaign has started a conversation all over the world about the evils of colonisation,” he added.

On winning the Agency of the Year, he said: it's "an emotion I cannot even begin to describe. When I used to watch other agencies win the title I often wondered if I ever would get that same honour." He added, "Not just me I think no one in the entire Indian ad industry has been part of such a huge haul of Lions ever before...I doff my hat to the entire team responsible for the Unfiltered History Tours. Those who are with us now and those who have moved on. Congratulations all.”

<strong>What is the Unfiltered History Tour?</strong>

The campaign is a guided tour for visitors at the British Museum, which houses some of the world’s most disputed artefacts. Through The Unfiltered Tour, visitors to the museum could scan the artefacts using Instagram filters and unlock an augmented reality (AR) experience that visually teleport the objects back to their homeland. Taking this further, The Unfiltered History Tour also extends into a ten-part podcast series featuring experts from the countries where the artefact was taken from and not from where it’s currently housed. This was done to provide a broader education on the artefacts, as well as the history and ongoing impact of colonialism.

The germ of the campaign idea came up during a casual conversation between the agency’s former chief creative officer PG Aditiya and former CEO Gautam Reghunath. The campaign took about 18 months to come together. Once the campaign took off, Aditiya, Reghunath, and a few others who worked on it, quit to set up a new creative hot shop called Talented.

<strong>Credit culture took the spotlight</strong>

Dentsu Webchutney has been entering the campaign for awards and has been bringing shiny metals home from across the globe. Every time a few trophies are added to the agency’s shelves, they tag Aditiya, Reghunath, and a few others on social posts giving them due credit and respect. So much so that Gurbaksh Singh, chief innovation officer, Dentsu Creative India, couriered a replica of the Grand Prix trophy to Reghunath before he flew to Cannes and asked him to unbox it when they win. Singh had a gut feeling that the campaign will win big.

The team spirit of Dentsu Webchutney and Talented is setting the right example for the ad industry. It says a lot about how the Indian creative community is becoming more mature when it comes to sharing credit.

<strong>When creativity meets data and business transformation</strong>

Ogilvy India and Wavemaker made history, too, by winning a Titanium Lion. The agency got it for its Cadbury Celebrations’ ‘Shah Rukh Khan - My Ad’. In 2020, as a part of the brand’s ‘Iss Diwali Aap #KiseKhushKarenge?’ campaign, Mondelez India’s ‘Not Just A Cadbury Ad’ leveraged artificial intelligence to create hyper-personalised spots for local businesses in and around 260 pin codes. It married creativity and tech with a purpose: to promote local businesses at a time when they were worst hit by the pandemic and lockdowns. The campaign tied in with Cadbury's global brand positioning centred on genuine acts of kindness and generosity.

In 2021, in addition to the hyper-personalised brand films that reached the end-consumers, local retailers got a chance to make a version of these ads for their stores, using the AI-powered technology developed by Rephrase.ai. Small businesses that are pinned on Google maps could share their custom-made ad featuring Bollywood superstar Shah Rukh Khan through WhatsApp. In these ads, Khan was seen nudging consumers to shop from various local stores. Wavemaker India was the media agency behind the campaign.

The agency also won Gold Lions in categories like Creative Data and Direct.

<strong>The other Grand Prix winner</strong>

The other Grand Prix this year went to VMLY&R India's 'The Killer Pack' campaign for Maxx Flash in the Health & Wellness Lions. In India, garbage collection points act as major breeding grounds for diseases like dengue and malaria, while mosquito repellent coils are only used to fight mosquitoes inside homes, Maxx Flash decided to change that practice. The mosquito repellent brand introduced The Killer Pack, a 100% biodegradable, innovative packaging lined with 5% Active Probiotic Bacillus thuringiensis, which kills mosquito larvae when disposed of in garbage dumps, dustbins, and stagnant water, helping to break the vicious cycle.

The campaign also won Lions in categories like Creative Commerce and Creative Business Transformation. The agency’s campaign ‘Smart Fill’ for Unilever picked up a Silver Lion in the Sustainable Development Goals category.

These campaigns indicate that at the core of technology-driven work is creativity and data that pushes the envelope and powers marketing strategies.

<strong>Purpose-driven narratives win big and a Grand Prix </strong>

Historically, India is known for winning big advertising awards for campaigns that are purpose-led. This year, too, a bunch of purposeful campaigns roared at Cannes Lions.

Leo Burnett India’s campaign ‘The Missing Chapter’ for P&G India’s Whisper got India’s first Grand Prix for Sustainable Development Goals Lions. It’s a category that celebrates creative problem solving, solutions, or other initiatives that harness creativity and seek to positively impact the world.

Leo Burnett India’s film titled ‘The Missing Chapter’ is a part of the brand’s #KeepGirlsInSchool movement. It was designed to illustrate how a girl’s lack of period education contributes to her missing school days, a situation exacerbated by the glaring absence of period education in Indian textbooks. The same campaign won a Silver Lion in the category Health & Wellness.

Dheeraj Sinha, CEO Leo Burnett, South Asia & Chairman BBH India, tells Storyboard18 that what makes this an award-winning campaign "is perhaps both that fact that it balances creativity and purpose while also helping the brand scale up and meet its business objectives. It is an impactful campaign that makes a real difference to both consumers and the business itself."

He further indicated, "one of the biggest problems holding girls back is a lack of period education. 23 million girls fall out of the education system because they don’t understand what’s happening to them. The missing chapter is another initiative towards keeping girls in school. It's real in its impact."

Rajdeepak Das, CEO and chief creative officer, South Asia, Leo Burnett, tells us that the campaign also took a granular approach. "We decided that if the girls don’t have access to the chapter on period education, we will take the chapter to them. Thus evolved the idea of using one of India’s oldest communication forms – ‘wall-art’ to spread period education by taking this chapter to India’s smallest towns and villages," he explains.

After identifying 28 art styles specific to the geography of each state, the agency worked with local artists to create custom hand-drawn paintings centred around ‘The Missing Chapter’ on periods. Hyper-localized in 28 different languages, slogans with catchy lines were crafted to bust period myths along with a 3-step visual aid on how to use a pad. These paintings have been put up on school and village walls – a place no girl can miss seeing these.

<strong>Indian Lions roar on the global stage</strong>

FCB India is the other Indian agency that got home Lions. FCB India and Kinnect a bunch of Lions for SOS Children’s Village India’s ‘Chatpat’ campaign. In the Film category, which was announced on the last day at Cannes Lions, the campaign got a Silver and Bronze Lion each. DDB Mudra’s ‘Machine-Gun Mouth’ spot for Battle Battlegrounds Mobile India promoted responsible gaming. Made by Early Man Films this ad picked a Bronze Film Lion.

VMLY&R India’s campaign ‘Adeli’ done for Unipads was India’s only winner in Glass Lions. The agency picked up a Bronze Lion.

From period talk to addressing the ongoing impact of colonialism, Indian agencies took on several purposeful subjects and married data, tech and creativity to create impactful work for clients and at the same time make history at the Cannes Lions.

GRAND PRIX