The Hindu Business Line : Cannes do good

The buzz among the swarthier visitors to Cannes is that it is the Year of India. Yes, hamara mahan Bharat has got its first ever Grand Prix at the Cannes Lions advertising festival! JWT has done it for us, winning the Direct Grand Prix for its Lead India campaign on behalf of The Times of India. The celebratory parties have taken their toll - making it difficult to distinguish between the figurative buzz in the air and the more literal indulgence-induced one inside our joyful collective desi headspace!

Direct marketing has always been about moving people to act; about a measurable response. And the Lead India campaign mobilised one of the world’s largest populations. The product at stake was not just a newspaper but the country itself.

First for India

This win is important not just because it is the first grand prize won by India at Cannes but because it represents a trend that is gathering momentum: Consumers want to buy into brands that not just offer them a good product but also do good in the world. The outdoor Grand Prix winner last year was a South African bank called Nedbank. The bank put up a hoarding with a solar panel that generated electricity for the kitchen of a school in a poor township. The line on the hoarding read, “Can a bank really give power to the people?” As the hoarding demonstrated, indeed it can.

Another ‘Cannes do’ winner in the Direct category this year was a campaign done for the Prodis Down’s Syndrome Foundation. Its ad agency Vitruvio hired four individuals with Down’s Syndrome to create the campaign with the theme ‘Let us do it’ and included a 25-minute documentary titled The Story of a Beautiful Ad that ran on prime time television.

Speaking about brands doing good, one cannot leave out Nike: It is promoting its ‘Human Race’ at Cannes this week - a 10-km race that will be run simultaneously in 25 cities around the globe on August 31, 2008. Nike hopes that a million people will participate, each person running for a worthy cause of his or her choice, be it an established charity such as WWF or something far more local or personal. Yes, this initiative will help Nike make more profits, but it will also end up doing some good in the world.

Green campaign

Going green is one aspect of the general do-good trends that is permeating advertising. While visionary brands such as Nike are leading the trend of their own accord, lesser brands are merely toeing the line because they feel pressured by consumers to adopt a greener stance.

The latter kind were the target of the Cannes seminar entitled ‘Avoiding Greenwash: How to Align Your Communications with Sustainable Principles and Practice’. In this seminar, Clownfish’s CEO Diana Verde Nieto defined greenwashing as when the advertiser uses green or natural imagery to position itself as more environmentally aware than it really is. Not wise - in the age of the Internet, the truth will out at lightning speed.

The advice at the seminar was seemingly obvious: Genuinely go green; if you fake it, the consumer will find out and the only shade of green you will turn is the one associated with a sick and dying brand.

To all the critics of advertising I say that we are proving that advertising has the power to do good; and, from South Africa to India, we are using that power more and more. Mahatma Gandhi would have approved. Perhaps he would have also been pleased (though admittedly it is stretching things a bit) that Indian advertising, a mere cottage industry - judging by the numbers - is finally coming of age in the global arena.

One is not extrapolating this from just the one Grand Prix we have won here but from the entire awards tally thus far: We have not yet reached the film and integrated awards that come at the end of the Cannes week and India already has 21 pieces of metal in its bag. This is an unprecedented number and would have made 2008 a landmark year for Indian advertising even if we left the Grand Prix completely out of the picture.

So let me raise a toast to India’s conquest of Cannes, to the rise of nobler sentiments in advertising and to the excellent champagne to be had here. Cheers! (Oh, is that the advertising buzz that I feel in my head?)

(The writer is Executive Creative Director (South Asia), Ogilvy & Mather, Mumbai)

More Stories on : Events | Awards & Honours | Advertising

Article E-Mail :: Comment :: Syndication :: Printer Friendly Page

Stories in this Section
Bata turnaround is sustainable: Chairman

Competition panel chief Vinod Dhall quits

Cannes do good

Nokia stays at top with 52% in handsets

West Pioneer eyeing southern market

Monsoon brings cheer to water purifiers

Citymax bullish on coffee biz

Ford small car project on track