With less than a month to go for the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, Manifest has started 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's Havas India's entries to the festival.

Alembic: LullabAI - Every Mother’s Right To Sing (Havas Life Mumbai)
Categories applied in: Audio and Radio, Health & Wellness.

In India, lullabies are more than just songs. They are a profound cultural ritual. They represent a unique bonding experience between a mother and her child, playing a crucial role in a baby’s cognitive, social, and emotional development. For speech-impaired mothers, the chance to share this cherished tradition has long been out of reach.

‘LullabAI’ aims to bridge this gap, offering these mothers an opportunity to create lasting memories with their babies through personalised lullabies.

The platform harnesses re-imagined AI technology to transform short voice samples from speech-impaired mothers into lullabies. By employing advanced data cleaning, augmentation, and model training techniques, ‘LullabAI’ captures and applies the mother’s voice to a library of pre-recorded lullabies, creating a deeply personal and culturally relevant experience. The personalised lullaby is then available for the mother to play for her baby anytime.

Swiggy: Bhog Elo Boney

Categories applied for: Glass: The Lion for Change and Outdoor

Bhog Elo Boney by Swiggy Foods transformed the social narrative around widowhood in India particularly for the Tiger Widows of the Sundarbans by turning their cultural exclusion during Durga Puja into a powerful act of inclusion. Through a floating Durga Puja pandal, the campaign brought the festival directly to the widows, allowing them to participate in rituals they were traditionally banned from. Beyond symbolic inclusion, the initiative also created a lasting impact by enabling economic empowerment by listing their local produce on Swiggy’s platform. This culturally rooted campaign challenged age-old prejudices and proved that true celebration means leaving no one behind.

The Times of India: Ink of Democracy 

Categories applied for: Print and Publishing, Media, Direct, Titanium, Design, Creative Data Lions and PR

In the previous Indian General Elections, around 33% eligible voters didn’t turn up due to laziness, lack of awareness, and political alienation. This led to 7,500 litres of unused electoral ink— a purple-coloured ink, normally used to mark fingers after voting to prevent duplication of votes.

Just before the 2024 elections, for the first time in history, pages of The Times of India and The Economic Times were printed in purple ink instead of the traditional black. For every 132 absent voters, one page was printed, totalling 2.28 million prints and one appeal: “Don’t waste a drop of electoral ink. Don’t waste the power of democracy.”

The ink once used as a mark of democracy became a reminder to defend it. As a response to the campaign, India broke free from political apathy and despite an intense heatwave, the country witnessed a world record of 642,000,000 voters turning up to cast their vote.