India at Cannes: Leo Burnett India's entries

The agency has shared three entries for this year's Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity.

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 Leo Burnett India's entries for this year's festival. The agency has shared three entries.

Gatorade: Turf Finder

In a nation of 1.4 billion people, it’s shocking that only 2% play sports. The reason? Rapid urbanisation. Especially in a city like Mumbai where all open grounds have been encroached upon. Leaving 1 playground for 1 million. 76% of Indians complain of ‘lack of space’ for not playing at all. We wanted to realistically address the lack of space by unlocking new spaces within the limited area of the cities.

In partnership with Google Maps, we used their historical data tool to find when roads go empty – becoming open spaces to drop the turf and play. Why roads? Because Indian roads are temporal. Their usability is measured not just by space, but by space and time.

The key task was to use Google's Location Insight's tool to identify:

Car density
People density
Traffic density

Scanning roads, streets, and lanes, and predicting the time when they go empty helped us plan for all our future drops. This data was also fed into our website allowing players to find a turf and pre-book or call for enquiries.

Turf Finder can change the way sports infrastructure is looked at. A simple traffic data was able to visualise opportunity for sport. A solution for any high-density city in the world. A win for sports.

Oreo: Say It with Oreo

Oreo, a cookie known for playful conversations and connections, noticed that people were struggling to have open conversations like, “How do I ask my boss for a raise?”; “How do I apologise to my wife for forgetting her birthday?”; “How do I tell my parents I don’t want to get married?”

We knew that humour can instantly turn a serious situation into a playful one. But since not everyone has a funny bone, we decided to make this superpower accessible to all.

We teamed up with Farhan Akhtar, India’s funny guy who is renowned for his wit, and printed alphabets on our cookies, which when scanned, helped India Say it With Oreo. Whenever India was at a loss for words, we employed AI to answer their questions in Farhan’s voice, using his wit and humour. This was a first-of-its-kind, largest AI-led campaign for Mondelez - Oreo –leveraging Generative AI to produce witty responses to customer’s questions in Farhan Akhtar’s voice. The campaign was entirely AI-enabled and did not require any human intervention after the customer asked a question. This, by far, is the most interesting feature of the campaign allowing us to unlock the door to unlimited and fully personalised messaging at scale.

Ikea - Ads that save time

Ikea’s products are ideal for saving time in everyday ordeals. The seconds saved daily with Ikea culminate into hours in a lifetime, almost 5000 hours. So, to demonstrate how Ikea can help save time, we created ads that save time, a series of time-saving YouTube pre-rolls. The ads featured characters, who with the help of Ikea's organising products, pressed the skip button before the viewer could, establishing that organising with Ikea is indeed awesome.