Every year, Manifest aims to put Indian agencies that enter the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity on the world's radar, even before the festival kicks off with its 'Cannes Contenders' series.

Last year, Indian agencies submitted a total of 982 entries for the festival and won 32 Lions.

We continue this year's series with Dentsu Creative's entries for the festival. The agency would be hoping to return to its 2022 high when it won 'Agency of the Year' at the festival. Last year, it won just one Bronze.

Here is this year's entry:

DAV Public School in partnership with Classteacher Learning Systems: Bullying Decoder

Cannes Lions categories: Audio & Radio, Creative Data, Digital Craft, Direct, Innovation

The insight:

Verbal bullying is the most pervasive and least addressed form of bullying in schools today. It doesn’t leave visible scars, but its impact is deeply emotional and long-lasting - often shaping how students see themselves over time. Because it happens in passing comments, tone, and repeated behaviour, it remains difficult to track or understand at scale, leaving a critical dimension of student experience unmeasured, and therefore unaddressed.

At the same time, schools affiliated with the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) are required to have CCTV infrastructure in place for student safety. While these systems continuously capture visual data, they have never been leveraged to understand what students are actually experiencing through language and interaction. In parallel, school counselling frameworks have largely remained one-size-fits-all, failing to account for how bullying evolves across age groups and grades.

The idea:

'Bullying Decoder' activates the unused audio layer of existing CCTV systems and uses AI to move beyond keyword detection - analysing emotional intensity, tone, and repetition to surface patterns of verbal bullying across classrooms and grade levels. Insights are anonymised and aggregated (no individual student is identified, and no audio is stored), and delivered to principals and counsellors via a secure dashboard.

This enables a shift from reactive discipline to proactive, grade-appropriate, empathy-led counselling interventions - guided by four principles: Privacy, Pattern, Intervention, and Empathy.

Why it matters:

In a system serving over 250 million children, reimagining infrastructure that already exists - rather than adding more - creates a scalable, human-centric solution to a problem that has long remained in a systemic blind spot.

Also read:

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