Q] Cannes Lions is the north star for all agencies but over the years has owning a Cannes Lion become imperative or optional?
We have never seen it as Cannes Lions—we saw it more like a standard not as the destination. We want to do work that meets that benchmark because it is an indication that the work is truly excellent. So, is doing great work imperative? Yes, it absolutely is.
Q] We see Gen Z doing a lot of things very differently from the seniors in the industry. For them, how important is Cannes Lions?
I don’t think you can change standards for different generations. We push for that standard. If you have not done great work yet, watching someone else do it will inspire you and if you have done it, you will want to do it again to feel that rush. So, we are trying to make our agency – including the GenZ subscribe to the rush, not the show.
Q] DDB Mudra has consistently won at Cannes Lions in the past half a decade except last year, which are the campaigns you are confident will win this year?
I can never tell you if I’m sure about winning something at Cannes Lions. But I can tell you what I’m excited about from the work we’ve done this year. We did a piece for BGMI, great clients who we have partnered for a long time now. For them, we were trying to solve the ‘imagery problem’ that surrounds video games. People assume that if someone is playing games he’s addicted, he’s violent, when in fact multiplayer gaming is like a new age social circle, where people show up daily, meet up virtually, talk to each other about life ---it’s like a new adda. So, we thought of portraying it as a connection platform more than just gaming. We asked ourselves what’s the ultimate connection you can talk about, and we stumbled on the perfect case study- Tanupreet and Jaspreet who fell in love while gaming and got engaged.
We said they have to get married where they met, so we went on to organise their entire wedding-- mehendi, sangeet, haldi, baraat, pheras -- inside the game. The game, of course, isn’t created for weddings, it’s built for shooting, so we had to really work to turn it into something else. But when we started re-customizing things, we realized that the game can stretch and accommodate something as powerful as love. We topped it up with beautiful collaborations, bringing in gamers and influencers like Tanmay Bhat, while the attendees included Karan Johar, Neeraj Chopra etc; Ritu Beri designed the wedding gown and Benny Dayal sang at the sangeet. Interestingly, the wedding video got more views than certain Bollywood couples’ wedding videos.
Q] Which are the other promising entries you are sending this year?
There is a campaign for Stayfree which is a Cannes regular for us, this time it is about ‘Beta Stayfree le aana’, normalising conversation about menstruation within the family. There is another one for McDonald’s, for the Shake Shake Fries, which we turned into a musical instrument called Shakashaka, bringing in this character called Papaji, who told everyone how to play tunes with a bag of fries. It was just hilarious. And that’s something which is also in our agency’s DNA — humour.
Q] Is humour back in advertising?
Yes, it is. Thankfully, it never left our building. So, we don’t have to worry about it coming back. But humour represents an advertising agency’s truest kind of energy. There’s so much banter in advertising agencies. Even in the most serious meetings, someone will say something that absolutely cracks everyone up. That’s the fun bit. So, we’ve always loved humour as a part of our DNA. That reminds me of another piece we are entering at Cannes for Flipkart’s Big Billion Days; we partner with the brand on many projects. This one was specifically targeting Gen Z, helping them navigate one of the biggest challenges any young person in this country has to face— their parents saying, Sale is okay, but why are you wasting money? In our country, money spent is money wasted no matter what it’s on. So, we recast the idea of a sale for Gen Z in a way that allowed them to make their parents believe that they weren’t just buying stuff, they were in fact ‘winning’ stuff. Every time you ordered something, you could pre-order a scratch card with the exact same thing, which you could proudly show to your parents, making them happy.
Q] Did the genesis of that idea come from your personal life? Have you been a master storyteller on purchase discounts in front of your parents?
Interestingly, the idea came from a personal incident I had while working in Malaysia. I’m a big comic book buff. I love action figurines. There was this fantastic shop in Malaysia where I used to drool over beautiful figurines of Wolverine, Hellboy, even lesser-known characters like Gambit. And there was this absolutely stunning bust of Wolverine in his old yellow gear, cigar in mouth, just perfect. I said, “I want that.” The guy said, “No, dude, it’s already sold.” I was heartbroken.
Then I saw another one and asked, “Can I have that?” He said, “Sorry, that’s also sold.” I suddenly realised everything I liked in the shop was sold. I almost asked, “Why is your shop open?” Then he explained: “There’s this one guy, a hardcore comic book action figure collector, he has bought all this stuff. But his wife told him, ‘If you bring one more of those home, I’ll break your legs.’ So, every time there’s a special occasion in his life, his friends come here, pick one of the items he has already bought, and give it to him. That’s how they go into his house.”
We were working on Flipkart when we remembered that story. And after that, the whole campaign opened up. There’s some guy in Malaysia who inspired it, if we knew his name, we’d have put him in the credits. We basically enabled the Genz to make up that fabricated story to tell their folks about purchases, more smartly on a bigger scale.
Q] Which was the first ever Cannes Lions award that you won?
The first-ever Cannes Lions award I won was for Colgate, around 2005/2006. It was for a series of spots we did for their toothbrushes. We created a campaign where we replaced the usual beep used to censor abusive words in rap songs, with the sound of brushing. And at the end of each song, wherever the beeps had appeared, we added a five-second tag that simply said: “Get the filth out of your mouth with Colgate.” It was a media innovation, very simple, but effective. In fact, it was the quickest recording I’ve ever done. I didn’t brush my teeth in the morning, went straight to the studio, brushed there, and that was it — we had the sound.
