Cannes 2014: 4 more Lions for JWT's Nike film; 1 more for Lowe's Kan Khajura

JWT's Make Every Yard Count film for Nike Cricket has won 2 Branded Content & Entertainment Lions, 1 Film Lion and 1 Film Craft Lion. Lowe's Kan Khajura Station innovation has won 1 Branded Content & Entertainment Lion.

On Saturday night, the very last batch of this year's Lions were given away at Cannes, and it turned out to be quite a sparkling night for JWT India. The agency bagged four more Lions - Two Silver Lions in the Branded Content & Entertainment category, one Silver Film Craft Lion and one Bronze Film Lion. All four Lions are for the same campaign - the agency's Make Every Yard Count film for Nike Cricket. 1st December Films is listed as the production company.

The night held something special for Lowe and Partners India as well; the agency took home a Bronze Lion for its path-breaking Kan Khajura Station innovation for Unilever India, in the Branded Content & Innovation category. Ozontel Hyderabad is listed as the contributing company.

In all, 66 Film Craft Lions, 105 Film Lions and 66 Branded Content & Entertainment Lions were given away this year.

No Innovation Lion for India. Interestingly, only four countries took home an Innovation Lion this year - Russia (Innovation Grand Prix), USA, Brazil and France.

No Titanium & Integrated Lions for India either; in this category, only 13 Lions were given away this time. Japan took the Titanium Grand Prix and UK took the Integrated Grand Prix.

Recap of JWT's winning Nike film:

From a bank of 2,25,001 crowd sourced images of cricket crazy youngsters, a film was created using 1,440 images. The film features 'seamless action', as the agency puts it, across a thousand playing fields; it's a film of the game in motion, basically. Athletes were invited, via Facebook, Twitter and www.nikecricket.in, to send in their images. The same action was also captured, by 108 traveling photographers, in playgrounds, streets, gullies and cricket pitches across India.

The chants, breaths, appeals, screams and sledges one typically hears during a heated cricket match were recorded and incorporated in the final soundtrack.

Read our detailed story on this campaign here.

Recap of Lowe's winning Kan Khajura Station innovation:

Kan Khajura Tesan or 'The Earworm Channel' is basically an 'On-demand' entertainment channel on a mobile phone; it is HUL's very own structured, branded media channel on the mobile platform, that offers jokes, music and latest Bollywood content. This content is interspersed with radio advertisements for Unilever's mass consumer brands.

The idea was to reach India's rural population, one plagued by daily power cuts. Moreover, in India, these areas see no more than 20 per cent of traditional media coverage.

Mobile operators and content providers were brought together for the implementation of this idea. To launch the station (or 'tesan' as the rural pronunciation goes) rural audiences were invited to call the unique station identity number and hang up, only to be called back with entertaining content. Basically, it can be summed up as 'free entertainment for a missed call'.

Across two states the channel gained eight million subscribers in a matter of six months, during which time, Unilever's ads were heard over 20 million times. Spontaneous awareness of these brands soared - Wheel by 20 per cent, Closeup by 39 per cent and Ponds by 56 per cent.

With one million unique callers per month, and total usage of over 140 million minutes of content, it has become the largest media channel in the region.

This is the first time the mobile phone has been used as an 'entertainment portal' in India. And the cost per contact was just four US cents.

Special Mention - O&M India

Note that Ogilvy & Mather India, Mumbai, was awarded a Silver 'Lions Health' award for its 'Cleft To Smile' Cleft Awareness campaign for Operation Smile India, in the Health and Wellness sub-category. This year, the first edition of Lions Health, a healthcare communications awards function, took place on June 13 and 14. All of 800 people from 50 countries gathered to share, judge and celebrate the life-changing creativity of the world's best healthcare communications. A total of 66 Lions were awarded from over 1,400 entries across two categories, namely, 'Pharma' and 'Health and Wellness'. Lions Health promises to return in June 2015.

O&M India's Cleft To Smile campaign was also a contender for the 'Grand Prix for Good' award. This special award rewards work that is ineligible to win a Grand Prix in its category because it is made for charities/not for profit or contains charitable or public service messages. The Titanium and Integrated jury selected the winner for this special category.

O&M was eligible for this Lion because it won a Design Gold for its Cleft To Smile campaign. Unfortunately, this effort didn't win this special Lion; instead, the Grand Prix for Good went to Lemz Amsterdam, The Netherlands, for its campaign for Terre Des Hommes Netherlands, an international children's' aid organisation. Titled 'Sweetie', the campaign helped spread awareness about a horrific modern day problem called 'webcam child sex tourism'.

Recap of O&M's Cleft Awareness campaign:

The campaign helped spread awareness around the issue of cleft lips (a congenital defect that causes the upper lip to have a very visible cleft or fissure) through Twitter. In all, the campaign fetched 20,000+ tweets and 100+ celebrity tweets (names include Alia Bhatt, Amitabh Bachchan, Abhishek Bachchan, Chetan Bhagat, Shashi Tharoor and Shilpa Shetty Kundra). Total campaign reach was 30 million. The symbol :{to:) that stands for cleft or ':{' to smile or ':)' became the world's most tweeted logo. Read our detailed story about this campaign here.

This year, two marketers from Hindustan Unilever - Janvi Parekh and Samyukta Iyer - won a Silver in the Young Lions competition.

Catch up on all the latest updates from the Cannes Lions - International Festival of Creativity here.