On the day one of the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity 2026, Josy Paul, chairperson and CCO, BBDO India, and Sonal Chhajerh, NCD, Leo India, spoke about how one can scale their brand across cultures, the use of AI and more. 

The duo was a part of a roundtable discussion on 'How to move at the speed of Asia.' Moderated by Melanie Speet, director, Spikes Asia, the other speakers were Adams Fan, CEO, F5 Shanghai; and Shilpa Sinha, chief strategy officer - global markets - L'Oreal, McCann.

Chhajerh emphasised that localisation is critical to a brand's growth.

She said, "Localisation is very important for a brand or business. The thinking has to switch from how do you localise to the market to what are the problems you can solve - that becomes the priority. When that happens, we will see brands doing much better and making deeper inroads within markets. Brands should not become rigid, and it shouldn't come at the cost of relevance."

Focusing on how Asia is different from the West, Paul observed, "Asia is not singular. It's plural. The collapse of the legacy consumer journey is very apparent in Asia. The journey is broken and has now become a community experience where commerce is a part of that experience. It's a beautiful connection of the different aspects of content, community and commerce. There was a line in one of HSBC's campaigns - 'Think global, act local', I think that still holds true. You stand for something and then let it flow into the local culture. "

On the topic of AI, Chhajerh stated, "AI is something that we are all learning as we go along. Brands are getting it right and wrong. The ones who are doing it right are human-behaviour first, and not the application of AI and skills. Human intelligence still needs to be the first step in the whole process. Another thing about AI is when it levels out, and if we don't have human intervention with it, it becomes more and more synthetic and less imperfect. But what actually appeals is the imperfection. The need for human intervention in AI is important for it to keep going."