Cannes 2014: 'Titanium' Shortlist for McCann; 'Integrated' Shortlist for Lowe

McCann Worldgroup India has one Titanium shortlist. The agency's Share My Dabba campaign for Happy Life Welfare & Dabbawala Foundation pulled this one in. Interestingly, in the Titanium category, only 16 entries have been shortlisted this time.

Details about McCann's Share My Dabba campaign:

For this campaign, team McCann partnered with Mumbai's famed dabbawala network to alleviate the problem of hunger on the streets of Mumbai. Daily, 2,00,000 children go hungry ad two starve to death. Through a 'Share Sticker', the dabbawalas were alerted to dabbas that contained un-eaten food; they shared these 'marked' dabbas with children in need. As a result, through just two hubs in the city, thousands of hungry children were fed. Besides catching the attention of India's Human Resource Minister and netizens alike, the effort also inspired private lunch services to follow suit.

Details about Lowe's Kan Khajura Tesan campaign:

Kan Khajura Tesan or 'The Earworm Channel' is basically an 'On-demand' entertainment channel on a mobile phone; it is HUL's very own structured, branded media channel on the mobile platform, that offers jokes, music and latest Bollywood content. This content is interspersed with radio advertisements for Unilever's mass consumer brands.

The idea was to reach India's rural population, one plagued by daily power cuts. Moreover, in India, these areas see no more than 20 per cent of traditional media coverage.

Mobile operators and content providers were brought together for the implementation of this idea. To launch the station (or 'tesan' as the rural pronunciation goes) rural audiences were invited to call the unique station identity number and hang up, only to be called back with entertaining content. Basically, it can be summed up as 'free entertainment for a missed call'.

Across two states the channel gained eight million subscribers in a matter of six months, during which time, Unilever's ads were heard over 20 million times. Spontaneous awareness of these brands soared - Wheel by 20 per cent, Closeup by 39 per cent and Ponds by 56 per cent.

With one million unique callers per month, and total usage of over 140 million minutes of content, it has become the largest media channel in the region.

This is the first time the mobile phone has been used as an 'entertainment portal' in India. And the cost per contact was just four US cents.

For the record, this year, Prasoon Joshi, chairman and chief creative officer, McCann Worldgroup India and president, South Asia, presided over the Titanium and Integrated Lions jury.