The Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity kicks off on 17 June 2024. Manifest's coverage for the festival continues with its 'India at Cannes' series. This series will showcase all of India's entries to this year's festival, speakers giving a sneak peek of their talks, and those attending the festival sharing expectations. 

In this piece, we showcase Mindshare India’s entries for this year's festival. The agency has shared six entries.

Lifebuoy: A divine ‘AR’ Intervention for hand hygiene

Hand hygiene penetration was consistently dropping to all-time lows in India, lower than it was before the pandemic, with the highest impact seen in West Bengal. This alarming revelation compelled Lifebuoy to increase hand hygiene relevance, improve handwashing habits and build salience for their ‘protection’ proposition in this market.

Eating food with hands is an integral part of Indian cuisine and culture, more so during the festive season. Durga Puja, the biggest religious festival in West Bengal, brings 85% of the population together at ‘pandals’, to not only click pictures and seek blessings of the Goddess Durga, but feast on the lip-smacking local food that is served at the end of it. The brand identified this as an opportunity to deliver a handwashing message to all the devotees within the pandal, right before they step out to eat.

Idea: Lifebuoy created Maa’s Message, a campaign that brought the goddess of strength and protection alive within the pandal. AI-generated QR codes camouflaged within the idol led unsuspecting, photo-hungry devotees to a real-time, contextual AR experience, where a virtual avatar of Maa came to life to safeguard her children from diseases by sharing a safety message with them. Handwashing stations placed strategically with the food stalls, awaited them at the end of the pandal, ensuring people washed their hands right after hearing her message, leaving a memorable impact on the visitors.

Britannia 50-50: The golmaal coach 

Britannia 50-50 Golmaal crackers, known for their unique combination of sweet, salty and spicy Flavors, are positioned on golmaal, the colloquial term 'for something with a twist'.

To build a deeper connection concept of ‘golmaal’ was brought to life during the ultimate cricketing event held in the India-World Cup; with the brand ambassador – Ravi Shastri. 

Indians love to win; and posing questions surrounding the players, pitch, weather, and teams is quite common. Cricket is full of tricky situations and uncertainties. The answer to these questions remains uncertain. But when in doubt, ask the coach. The campaign weaved the cricket coach’s experience to answer fans in a quirky and the golmaal way!  

Idea: Britannia Golmaal 50-50- AI coach campaign featured Ravi Shastri, generating AI-powered text-to-video responses for audience queries. The campaign combines ChatGPT4 with a text-to-video engine, creating a consumer-facing marketing campaign featuring a digital avatar trained to create automated videos with voice and facial expression modulation. This marks the first time a celebrity has provided AI-powered video responses with input from ChatGPT.

Britannia Marie Gold: My start-up show

India's third largest biscuit brand, Britannia Marie Gold (BMG), aims to differentiate itself by building emotional connections with women in West Bengal. According to a Nielsen study, 48% of women in India have a desire to be entrepreneurs, but unfortunately, only 13% of total entrepreneurs are led by women. BMG aims to be a beacon of empowerment for these women, transforming the traditional role of biscuits into a catalyst for change and progress.

Idea: The campaign and the show, were launched on Star Jalsha and Disney+ Hotstar, aiming to inspire the shortlisted 50 women entrepreneurs (out of the 35 thousand entries) to pitch their innovative business ideas. The platform provided upskilling resources for business growth, mentorship to pitch, and INR 1.7 crore monetary grants to 17 ideas. The campaign included a call for entries, a contest website, QR packtivation, and 360-degree media amplification through TV vignettes, OOH, influencers, PR, DTH, and radio. 

Britannia Nutrichoice: Healthy habit

84% of Indians said they are more health-aware post-covid. Hence, switching to digestive biscuits. But they don’t know that Britannia Nutrichoice digestive is the only real digestive in the country with 100% whole wheat and 0% refined wheat flour. 

That’s why they are flirting between brands not trusting one brand over the other.

When ads are seen as interruptions, how do we prevent the audience from unseeing our ad and trust the message? We realised reading newspapers is also considered a ‘healthy habit’ by Indians. They trust print media the most over any other broadcast outlet, making it the most authentic source of news and information. 

Idea: We combine two powers: trust in print ads and 820 million mobile phones with the internet, to create a print ad ensuring consumers not just see it but even engage with it. 

Consumers got to scan the print ad which came alive on their phones in a video form, wherein actor Ranveer Singh educates people about Britannia Nutrichoice being made from 100% whole wheat and 0% refined flour. 

Powering this technology is the visual transformer, a deep-learning AI-powered model of mixed-reality camera technology, engineered for image recognition and mapping to the virtual space with real-estate print media. Thus, we enabled the inception of a video ad inside a trusted printed ad and changing consumer behaviour from passive ad consumption to active engagement.

SBI Life: The most ignored rider

 While families worldwide collectively travel in a family car, Indians believe in the concept of a family bike. It’s a common sight to see a family ride a scooter, bike or two-wheeler in India. Especially in smaller cities like Jaipur and Ahmedabad. One-in-two households own a two-wheeler. But while Two-Wheelers are an affordable lifeline for Indians, the same cannot be said about Indian roads and their driving habits.

According to the respective state transport departments, every year approximately 5,000 and 7000 people die in accidents in Jaipur and Ahmedabad respectively as only 20% of two-wheeler riders wear helmets in these cities.

While over 100 plus two-wheeler and insurance brands actively speak about rider safety none have ever realised that the most important riders are the most ignored ones i.e. the kids. 0% of kids in India wear a Helmet for their safety, a fact that is also ignored by Indian authorities.

Insight - the most important rider of the family is the ‘most neglected’.

Idea: We introduced ‘little helmets’ that keep the Kids of the family safe. The first-of-its-kind with snug fitting, a movable safety visor, ISI Certified (Indian Government Safety Body) with extra soft cushioning just for the little rider. This marked the first instance where a brand championed the cause of helmets for kids, in association with the traffic authorities from both the states.

We knew on IPL match days, there would be family bikes out on the roads to beat the traffic. We chose the most accident-prone areas in Jaipur and Ahmedabad, where the traffic police were waiting to gift and educate the family bikers. 

SBI Life and RR co-created content on the importance of helmets and even created a larger-than-life 20ft helmet installation at the team’s stadium. The content reached close to 10 million RR fan-universe.

The helmet distribution drive engaged 10,000 family bikers and was further amplified with a rally of 500 traffic-police bikes, with kids as pillion riders wearing little helmets. The rally marked the importance of safety for the little ones and created ripples across local media garnering coverage across press, TV and social media.

 Castrol CRB Turbomax: Pragati Ki Paathshaala (the school of progress)

India transports 70% of its domestic freight by road, which accounts for 4.6 billion tonnes, involving a spend of INR 9.5 lakh crore. These gears of commerce are constantly being turned by 6 million truck drivers annually, who form the backbone of our supply chain and the driving force behind the nation’s economy.

Truck drivers often undergo harsh working conditions at low wages, health issues and unscheduled working hours that contribute to road crashes and fatalities. 

This unorganised nature of the trucking business as a result of no formal training and lack of opportunities to upskill, has stunted the growth prospects in this industry and left these unsung heroes of India without a voice for empowerment. A truck driver in India is unable to drive his own life. 

Idea: Castrol CRB Turbomax relaunched with a new promise of 3X Protection for a long and healthy engine life of trucks. Stemming from this commitment to 3X engine life protection, we envisioned the brand to take a step further and empower the lives of truckers in India.

Based on the insight that truckers often lack formal training and have limited literacy. We established Pragati ki paathshaala (the school of progress) on wheels.

Our aim was to transform Castrol into the essential partner for progress in every trucker’s journey across the country.

Truckers typically spend an average of 16 hours driving each day, with the remaining time at transport hubs. Consequently, improving the skills of this community necessitated the establishment of a physical infrastructure.

The school of progress embarked on a three-month journey where it aimed to educate the Indian truckers on-ground across multiple cities in India and conduct knowledge sessions.

Highlights of the campaign:

• Transformed two trucks into classrooms on wheels that travelled more than 8000 miles across all four regions of India. 
• Developed more than 200 pieces of content and conducted more than 19000 hours of classroom sessions across television, microsite, WhatsApp, YouTube, SMS, OOH, and IVR in seven different regional languages.
• On-ground health check-ups in the form of eye tests, oxygen levels and fever checks were done for all the truckers who attended classroom sessions.
• Special Humanitarian U.N. Award winner and philanthropist, Sonu Sood joined the campaign spreading the message through the campaign promo amongst 40 million plus followers.
• The launch of the campaign gravitated toward the support of Nitin Gadkari, minister of road transport and highways of India.
• An exclusive microsite that details real-time updates of the campaign.

Also read: 

India at Cannes: FCB Kinnect's entries

India at Cannes: MullenLowe Lintas Group's entries