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 are Leo India's entries.

Cathay Pacific – Takeoff Takeover

Takeoff Takeover was the first of its kind hyper-targeted airport takeover powered by real-time flight data.

With less than 1% of the category’s media budget, Cathay Pacific couldn’t outspend. We needed to outsmart.

So, we turned every competitor's takeoff into an opportunity for Cathay by reaching their flyers at their most vulnerable: their boarding gate. We tapped into layers of publicly available data- live flight data, aircraft data, real-time airport data, and complaint data from years of social listening. We turned all that cold data into clever creative and used it to deliver the right message at the right place and time.

 Mountain Dew ‘Peaks of Courage’

Mountain Dew, as a brand has always embodied fearlessness – ‘Darr ke Aage Jeet hai’; and ‘Peaks of Courage’ is an extension of that spirit, while also leveraging technology, storytelling, and community to reimagine what modern adventure looks like.

While Everest has long captured global attention, Nepal is home to eight of the world’s fourteen 8,000-meter peaks. These summits hold stories that deserve to be told—not just to thrill-seekers, but to a new generation of explorers seeking deeper meaning through bold experiences. With ‘Peaks of Courage’ Mountain Dew is putting Nepal’s formidable peaks on the map for the world to see—not just as destinations, but as symbols of bravery and ambition.

We partnered with the Nepal Tourism Board and Discovery Channel to create awareness and help adventure enthusiasts with a roadmap to conquer both the peaks and their fears. The campaign extends far beyond just a film, actively engaging with the mountaineering community through immersive digital storytelling and on-the-ground experiences. We aggregated real-time mountaineering data—weather patterns, climbing routes, Sherpa availability, terrain complexity—and translated it into a Fear Score, giving each peak a quantifiable identity based on challenge and intensity.

We then packaged this information in an immersive experience - accessible by scanning the Mountain Dew bottle. Each Mountain Dew pack features a QR code that unlocks an interactive digital hub -mdpeaksofcourage.com — offering exclusive insights into Nepal’s 8K, 7K, and 6K peaks, detailed route plans, difficulty levels, real-time conditions, and invaluable Sherpa wisdom. It’s a global platform where adventure-seekers can learn, plan, and prepare for their next big climb. It’s an adventure, algorithmically decoded.

PepsiCo Lays - Mitti Ki Chithi (The Letter)

Lays has been on a journey to build a sustainable and positive agricultural ecosystem, by creating access to knowledge and technology for not just its farmer partners, but all farmers in India.

As we delved deeper into finding solutions, we realised that the foundation of agriculture is soil - failing which, the quality of our harvests gets affected.

Our campaign ‘Reviving Mitti’ is championed by a film called ‘Mitti Ki Chitti’. It tells a deeply Indian, farmer-led story of soil revival and hope. Told through the metaphorical narrative of a mother’s letter to her farmer daughter, the film captures the daily toil and nurture that goes into making a great harvest, while also representing the growing community of female farmers by showing a woman farmer as the protagonist.

Rooted in the age-old Indian belief that the Earth (or ‘soil’; referred to as ‘Mitti’) is a sacred Mother that must be cared for, the film highlights the need to restore soil health and showcases how Lay’s is committed to making soil testing more accessible to Indian farmers. The idea of the campaign is to move beyond policy talk, turning soil health into a shared emotional and cultural responsibility.

Whisper: #KeepGirlsInSchool #EarlyPeriods

For our multiple award-winning campaign for P&G Whisper - Keep Girls In School we identified and started a conversation around a glaring anomaly no one is talking about- girls today are starting their periods as early as the age of 8. And the latest work we created talks to these 8-year-olds in a language they understand - through music.

The period song is India’s first such initiative, to not just teach young girls that periods are healthy but also to equip her ecosystem parents and teachers, enabling them to teach periods in an empowering way. The song was even recreated with two of the biggest names in the Indian music industry- Shreya Ghoshal and Sunidhi Chauhan. We even took period education into kid’s entertainment and turned cartoons into learning. 

The film and the Period song videos struck a chord with the masses, garnering unprecedented reach. The film has received over 75+ million views on YT while the Period song videos have received a cumulative of 242 million views on Instagram. The response from consumers and the public at large has been overwhelmingly positive and has given rise to much-needed open conversations around periods, and the rising occurrence of early periods in India. We have been working together with Whisper over the past 10 years to break the taboo around periods.