Roaring to Victory at Cannes Lions 2019, Indian Digital Agencies Elate Unanimously

The winning agencies from the Indian subcontinent included Dentsu Webchutney, FCB Ulka, Wunderman Thompson Mumbai, Mindshare, TBWA India, Grey Group India, Leo Burnett India, DDB Mudra, and Lowe Lintas. However, the most interesting trend for the Indian agencies to celebrate this year was the emergence of a digital agency at the forefront of the lion’s tally. Dentsu Webchutney piped every other creative and media agency from India to emerge as the winner of maximum Lions by bagging 6 out of 18 Lions and were at the top of the tally.

Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity is a melting point for all the creative, media, and digital agencies across the world. Every year members from advertising and marketing fraternity visit the festival and witness several awe-inspiring campaigns across different categories. These campaigns are based on simple everyday insights and integration with cutting edge technology helping them scale and impact a large consumer base for brands and institutions.

Cannes Lions 2019, the International Festival of Creativity, ended a fortnight ago with Indian agencies bagging over 50+ shortlists and 18 lions including Gold, Silver and Bronze across different categories. However, Grand Prix and Titanium Lions eluded them this year and India stood at 10th position in the overall Lions tally that was led by the USA, UK, and Brazil.

The winning agencies from Indian subcontinent included Dentsu Webchutney, FCB Ulka, Wunderman Thompson Mumbai, Mindshare, TBWA India, Grey Group India, Leo Burnett India, DDB Mudra, and Lowe Lintas. Some of the campaigns that won big from India were – The Open Door Project for the Millennium School under Sustainable Development and Brand Experience & Activation Categories; Project Free Period for Stayfree under the Sustainable Development Category; Hagglebot for Flipkart under Brand Experience & Activation and Creative eCommerce categories; Voice of Hunger under Mobile Lions, Direct Lions, and Social & Influencer Lions categories; Code Name – Uri in the PR category under Media & Entertainment sub-category; Lifebuoy #HelpAChildReach5 in Creative Strategy for Long term strategy under sub-category; The Infection Alert System for HUL’s Lifebuoy Soap under Media category for the Use of Real-time Data; #StopMithani’ for HDFC Bank in the PR category under the Use of Celebrity, Influencers & Key Opinion Leaders sub-category; P&G’s Gillette ‘The Barber Shop Girls – Shaving Stereotypes in the Entertainment Lions for Music category; Blink Test’ and ‘Blink Off’ for the Jimmy Nelson Foundation under the Industry Craft category; Vicks’ ‘One in a million #TouchOfCare’ won under Film Craft; One Mindful Mind campaign for Neurogen Brain And Spine Institute in the Print & Publishing category under the Commercial Publications sub-category and in the Health & Wellness category under the Brand-led Education & Awareness sub-category.

However, the most interesting trend for the Indian agencies to celebrate this year was the emergence of a digital agency at the forefront of the lion’s tally. Dentsu Webchutney piped every other creative and media agency from India to emerge as the winner of maximum Lions. They won 6 out of 18 Lions and were at the top of the tally.

Sidharth Rao, CEO & Co-Founder, Dentsu Webchutney, says, “We have said this before, awards or not, digital will force traditional advertising to be transformed into a more capable service provider. If you see our performance this year across Goafest, Kyoorius, and now Cannes, we outperformed our peers including the ones in mainline advertising. We won our first EFFIEs last year. We’ve made our mark across digital, PR, direct and media. What you saw today makes it abundantly clear that the last line of defence for mainline agencies, one that promised ‘integrated communications’ across the funnel has definitely blurred.”

Enthusiasm in the Industry

With Dentsu Webchutney getting recognized at the highest level of creativity across the globe, there is a lot of confidence in the entire digital agency fraternity of the country. Veterans and young agency professionals are even more optimistic about the future of digital agencies in India.

Sanjay Mehta, Joint CEO, Mirum India says, “It is a great day to celebrate as earlier Indian digital agencies even dared to send entries thinking that whether they would win or not. Secondly, the entries are extremely costly, so most of the digital agencies took the call of not going for it. The win will definitely open up the mindset of the agencies in the country and give them a huge boost. Most of the times, the digital agencies think that their work is fundamentally good but it may not be up to the level of winning at Cannes and is not awe-inspiring like the work from the agencies from other countries, however, Dentsu Webchutney’s win will start bridging that gap.” 

Adding to the sentiment, Saket Vaidya, Chief Operating Officer, Korra mentioned that the time for digital agencies have come. “This is a phenomenal win for the Indian digital agencies. Every time we saw the Cannes tally, the feeling was like ‘When will our time come’. Today, Dentsu Webchutney has accomplished that for India. It is not about that a particular agency won but it is a moment of pride for the entire community.”

Evolution of Digital Advertising in India

Digital Advertising in India has gone through several stages of evolution. According to an expert, about 15 years ago, the digital media inventory was given free of cost with the mainline inventory to lure the big clients. Later, when the clients first recognized the medium called digital, they were not sure of what could be done there and hence allocated nearly a percent or two of their entire marketing budgets. Another expert pointed out that digital came at the 75^th slide of a pitch and many times marketers would ask the agency to skip the slides deeming it not important.

It is important to note that for many years, the ecosystem for digital in India was also not ready. The Internet subscribers and digital penetration was not very high. For instance, 5-6 years ago, the cost of 1 GB data consumption on mobile phone was to the tune of Rs 250 and as a result, people were not very keen on spending time on watching videos on mobile. During that time, digital was restricted to desktops, However, post Jio revolution, things have changed massively, when the cost of data came down drastically and people started consuming content on their mobile phones. The moment gave an unprecedented fillip to the digital agencies as marketers now started asking to take their campaigns on mobile phones. This created a lot of opportunities for digital agencies to showcase their talent.

KV Sridhar, Founder & Chief Creative Officer, Hyper Collective mentions that the transformation started nearly 5-6 years ago, and it was high time that digital agencies started coming to the forefront. “Even at Cannes, the campaigns with innovations combined with the use of tech are getting more popular. If you look at the history of India at Cannes, it started with creative agencies winning Lions. Later, when media agencies started entering, people pointed them and said, the award was meant for creative agencies, but they went to win big laurels. Similarly, the time has now come for digital agencies. Today, the agencies that are an amalgamation of innovative ideas and tech will survive and outshine the other advertising agencies that are not ready to change. Today, digital agencies have opened a new avenue for India to win at Cannes Lions. Going forward, when this becomes a norm, people will ask why these agencies did not win a Grand Prix or a Gold or Titanium in a particular year. However, these questions only arise when people start believing that winning is the norm, so these questions are good.”

Marketer’s Trust

Earlier digital was restricted to the execution side of the campaigns, where the main the idea was coined by the creative agency and a rendition of it was taken to the digital medium. However, in last 3-4 years, marketers have started taking a leap and urging its digital agency to create an idea that favours the medium. A testimony to the thought is the increasing spend on the digital medium in last four years and the anticipation of growth by 30% in 2019 taking it to Rs 16,038 crores, as per the GroupM’s adex report for 2019.

Rao mentioned that it is not only the awards that are helping swing more spends. “It would actually be a horrible metric to monitor that. Internet penetration and usage drive marketing spend and by 2021 digital’s share of advertising will stand at 3.52 billion USD in a pie of 12 Billion USD, a total of 18%. For a lot of our clients, we are the lead agency now. We take a lot of pride in that. And that speaks volumes of what marketers perceive us as,” asserts Rao.

To this Shubho Sengupta, Independent Brand Consultant, and Co-Founder, Healthcare and Activewear Startups mentions that Dentsu Webchutney’s win will help the marketer to consider digital as a strong creative lead. “However, it is too early to say that one win will impact the entire digital advertising industry in India. The question is how many Dentsu Webchutney like agencies do we have in India. Today, a lot of mainline agencies have hired or are hiring the top digital guys and are going forward with the execution.”

Now, the question here is — are the marketers open to experimenting on the digital platform with the agency.

Mehta tells that win came after the campaign was created with the approval of the client, hence the brands are ready to experiment. “I think brands have started to realize that big ideas can happen on digital with better budgets,” shares Mehta.

It is important to understand that when we talk about cutting edge digital work that has always won big at Cannes is an amalgamation of an extremely simple idea derived from a common insight couple with high-quality tech. Now, the biggest hurdle that Indian agencies have always faced is that clients are keen on the idea but not ready to release big budgets that involve the creation and implementation of technology.

Gopa Kumar, EVP, Isobar, mentions that when we look at the digital work of other countries that win big, we understand that there is a still a long way to cover for the Indian digital agencies. “The level of sophistication that these agencies bring to an idea in terms of execution and tech is to another level. The size and scale are totally different. It is not that Indian agencies do not have good ideas, but their implementation is at a different level. It clearly reflects the extent to which the brand is willing to go for a large-scale idea,” shares Kumar.

Rao also echoed a similar sentiment and mentioned that it is tough winning at Cannes. “Digital or not. The fact that we won 6 lions means we have a seat on the table for sure. But to win a Grand Prix or gold I guess we need to work much harder with our clients,” shares Rao.

Talent Pool & Resources

People have always pointed out that do we have the right talent and resources to create out-of-the-box campaigns that can win big at the international festival and do justice to the brand.

Sridhar mentions that with this win, people at the digital agencies cannot complain that the market is not ready. “The only reason for which we have not been winning is simply – laziness. We have a great talent pool in the country with a huge number of techies running operations for big giants across the globe from India. We have enough labs and technology companies to support big ideas. The digital mediums such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram offer the same technology both in India and abroad, so how come agencies in those countries end up creating great and we are not able to do so. It is simply because of laziness. After this win, none of the digital agency professional will be able to say that we can’t do it. We have the capability, talent and technology and all we need is a couple of enterprising clients that can think big and back these ideas,” shares Sridhar.

Traditional vs Digital

Finally, the big question that has always been discussed in the agency circles is that traditional is way ahead of the digital agencies and there is a huge gap that will be needed to be bridged.

Rao after winning the Cannes Lions thinks that discussion is over now.

Sridhar also pointed out that there is nothing like a traditional agency or a new age agency. “Agencies have to evolve because if they don’t, they will vanish. India has enough precedence to that when several only print driven agencies vanished when TV came. So, if an advertising agency thinks that it does not need to evolve and understand where the consumer is, his content preferences, and how to cater them, then they will cease to exist. Today, if you do not learn how to tell a story via Tik Tok or other new mediums, then it will be difficult to survive. So, adoption is the key here,” shares Sridhar.

On the other hand, Sengupta believes that the future will see traditional agencies doing digital work. “They have an understanding of the brand such that they can adapt the digital, but it will be difficult for digital agencies to understand the brand in the same way,” adds Sengupta.