With less than a month to go for the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, Manifest continues with its Cannes Contenders series.

Through this, we aim to showcase India's work for the Lions before the festival kicks off, as the country looks to better its 18-Lions haul from 2024.

Here are MullenLowe Lintas Group's entries for the festival.

TVS Motor Company – Protect Little Riders

Indian parents wear helmets while riding their 2 wheelers but let their children ride unprotected, trusting parental love alone to shield them. TVS decided to shine the spotlight on this glaring blind spot by calling out this action as ‘unparenting’.

Our ‘Protect Little Riders’ campaign held up a mirror to well-meaning parents, urging them to rethink safety. But it didn’t stop at awareness. TVS launched a dedicated line of helmets for kids, turning concern into commitment.

The message was clear: true parenting means protection—for everyone on the ride. Because love is powerful, but safety is practical love in motion.

Britannia NutriChoice – Face The Facts

When de-influencers started setting the rules, NutriChoice didn’t push back — it leaned in.

With 'Face the Facts', the brand made the humble pack its hero: prime real estate for truth, transparency, and provocation. No heavy jargon, no health haloing, just simple, human truths delivered boldly on the front of every pack.

The creative challenge wasn’t lack of credibility, it was earning visible, everyday trust in a culture of doubt. By speaking the consumer’s language — casual, relatable, non-corporate — NutriChoice broke free from conventional health marketing tropes.

Britannia Marie – Ma Se Marie

Very rarely does a pack design manage to integrate the brand’s core message with a profound cultural phenomenon that’s deeply relevant to its TG. Britannia Marie Gold did this with Durga Puja (the annual festival worshipping the Mother-Goddess) in West Bengal, India.

The Mother Goddess is called ‘Ma Durga’, or very simply, ‘Ma’ (Mother). We found our very own ‘Ma’ – hidden in plain sight for years – on the pack’s front face. We redesigned our festive packs with ‘Ma’ in the Bengali script to deepen emotional resonance and strengthen engagement with homemakers across the state.

Britannia Milk Bikis – Paal Abhishekam

This activation is a beautiful reminder of what happens when a brand becomes deeply embedded in popular culture. To see Milk Bikis featured amid a fan mania surrounding a movie superstar, highlighted the brand’s deep-rooted cultural immersion in Tamil Nadu’s celluloid fandom culture. It speaks volumes about the bond it shares with the people.

This activation catapulted the brand into people’s hearts by immersing itself at the center of the movie frenzy culture, where movie stars are worshipped as living deities and interweaving itself as part of moments that matter in homes, memories, and in celebrations.

Vim – Equal Vows
This campaign transformed the Hindu wedding ceremony altogether. The age-old custom of placing the responsibility of household chores solely on women through their wedding vow was changed. 120 couples adopted a new practice of sharing each other’s wedding vows at a mass wedding. The Hindu priests community was engaged to advocate for this change among other couples looking to get married. An online campaign led by influencers encouraged couples that were already married to renew their wedding vows with the Equal Vow. A new cultural norm was created to support Vim’s brand purpose of degenderizing household chores.

Lifebuoy – H for Handwash ft. Moo Deng

Our strategy was grounded in behavioural science and child psychology. Kids aged 3 to 5 are at the ideal age for habit formation, but they don’t respond to traditional health messaging. They follow characters. They learn through play. So, we turned a viral cultural moment into a hygiene movement. Moo Deng captured attention. Teacher Hippo built the habit. Together, they transformed H for Handwashing from a familiar phrase into a fresh behaviour-change journey — combining emotional storytelling, AI-powered personalisation, and cultural localisation to make hygiene education feel personal, playful, and unforgettable at scale.

Alken DawAI Reader

Problem

In rural India, where 65% of the population resides, access to trained doctors is limited and pharmacies are sparse. In these underserved regions, local chemists often act as the only point of healthcare. Yet, one critical and avoidable factor threatens this fragile system, illegible prescriptions.

Every year, 5.8 million people die due to medical errors in India, a significant portion of these errors stem from misread prescriptions. With no digitisation and limited training, chemists are forced to guess the contents of these prescriptions. 

Solution

Introducing: Daw-ai Reader by Alkem Labs
An AI-powered, wireless prescription reader built to support chemists in India’s most remote pharmacies.
•    AI-Powered OCR + ML Engine: Trained on over 1 lakh real prescriptions, it decodes illegible handwriting using optical character recognition (OCR) and contextual understanding via machine learning.
•    Cross-Referenced Database: Decoded outputs are verified against government approved medical databases and known medicine combinations to ensure accuracy and safety.
•    Regional Audio Interface: To overcome literacy and language barriers, it reads aloud medicine names and dosages in local languages like Hindi, Marathi, Malayalam, and English.
•    Built for the Realities of Rural India: Portable, wireless, simple UI designed specifically for minimally trained staff in disconnected villages.
Impact
•    100K+ families across 250 villages have already been helped.
•    230K prescriptions decoded safely
•    78% reduction in second opinions

Steadfast – Dirty Money
Steadfast needed to promote its note counting machines to businesses that still rely on manual cash handling. The challenge: how do you make a low-involvement B2B product culturally and creatively relevant? The answer was a humorous film rooted in an everyday behavior—finger-licking while counting cash—and an exaggerated but believable situation.

The narrative doesn’t explain features directly; it creates discomfort and humor around inefficiency, subtly reinforcing the value of counting smarter. The campaign was designed for digital-first channels and trade circulation, where shareability and memorability were key. It succeeded in reframing a utilitarian product into a modern business essential.