Four Indian entries to contest in Cannes Lions Promo & Activation category

Four Indian entries to contest in Cannes Lions Promo & Activation category

Leo Burnett

MUMBAI: Four entries from India have made it to the shortlist of the Cannes Lions 2012 Promo and activations category.

These include JWT‘s work for Times of India Kerala titled God‘ Own Delivery Boys, DDB Mudra Group‘s The Killing Stapler campaign for the Sanctuary Magazine, The Door Step School‘s Ink Pad initiative by Leo Burnett India and Percept/H‘s Anti Terror Bag campaign.

JWT has been shortlisted in the ‘Publications and Media‘ sub category. The campaign was carried out when Times of India launched its Kerala edition. Kerala has been dominated by language dailies like Malayala Manorama and The Mathrubhumi.

In order to grab eyeballs and enter with a bang, TOI needed a campaign that would relate to local tradition. Drawing upon ancient local folklore, the newspaper employed 108 elephant delivery boys across 10 cities from where the local editions were to be published, 126 boat delivery boys across 1,500 km of backwaters and 180 kalari warrior delivery boys across the hill country.

The campaign used local loudspeakers, postcards, posters, press ads and radio spots to announce the phone number to call for home delivery anywhere in Kerala reaching out directly to urban and rural homes across the state. More than 100,000 newspapers were delivered on the launch day with a total of 500,000 plus newspapers delivered across seven days.

The Killing Stapler campaign, which has been shortlisted in the sub category ‘Use of Guerilla Marketing in a Promotional Campaign‘, was aimed at creating awareness about the negative impact of paper wastage through printed copies on wildlife.

To reach this objective, DDB Mudra Group designed a special stapler and discreetly placed around obvious sites as a part of the environment. This stapler, when used, printed a stamp at exactly the point the stapler held the paper intact, thus making the user realise how the printout harmed the environment. The agency planted 135 staplers over a span of nine days.

Leo Burnett‘s Ink Pad campaign for Door Step School has been shortlisted in the sub category ‘Charities‘. The initiative was an effort towards increasing awareness and participation in the client‘s adult literacy drive. The objective of the promotion was to give uninterested adults the first taste of how much fun learning could be.

In order to bring illiterate adults, Leo Burnett placed a transparent sheet with cut-outs of the alphabets of Hindi (devanagari script) on top of a regular ink pad which allowed illiterate individuals to print their name. A door to door activation was conducted with the help of local volunteers, using the ink pad and thus turning the symbol of illiteracy - the thumb imprint - into a tool to write and encouraged people to enroll for the adult literacy programme.

In the Public Health and Safety, ‘Pubic Awareness Messages‘ sub category, Percept/H has been shortlisted for its anti terror awareness campaign titled the Anti-Terror Bag. With the aid of law enforcement agencies, Percept/H agency placed a special knapsack inside local trains that contained a device that would tick like a time bomb and then announce a safety message.