This year, the Indian advertising industry is all geared up to meet the expectations around Cannes Lions after last year’s resounding success. Continuing with our series on the entries from India this year, we look at what Wondrlab is sending.

We reached to Amit Akali, CCO and Co-Founder, Wondrlab, who spoke to us on their entries for Cannes this year. “Wondrlab is just a two-year-old agency, and we spent the last many months putting together a system that constantly churns out great ‘Platform First’ work. So, it’s no surprise that both the pieces we are entering this year at Cannes are great examples of work on specific platforms like Spotify and Instagram. And they push the norms in those categories. More importantly, this is real work that’s done wonders for the clients in the marketplace. It’s the kind of work we want to keep creating on a regular basis. Awards are just a by-product.”

The Unheard Playlist - Case Video

Women artists are underrepresented in the Indian Music Industry. Spotify has always championed the cause of women artists. On International Women’s Day, Spotify wanted to highlight this underrepresentation and drive conversations in the music industry.

The concept: On International Women’s Day, Spotify and Sony Music dropped the ‘Unheard Playlist’ on Spotify. Featuring the most popular Indian duet songs ever, in Hindi and other regional languages. But with a twist. The female vocals were omitted from the duets.

And as people were left wondering what they had just heard. The message was revealed by the respective women artists (the biggest in the industry) whose vocals had been removed from their duet songs - “Couldn’t hear my voice? Felt strange hearing my song without my voice? Just like this track is incomplete without our voice, the Indian women industry is incomplete without women artists. This Women’s Day, spread our songs, support women artists, make us heard…” Starting a conversation on the underrepresentation of women in the Indian music industry. They silenced women’s voices to make them heard.

The challenges faced by the agency to execute this campaign was the music industry is very stringent about rights and alterations. And the concept needed them to take some of the most popular songs and remove the female vocals from them. He said, “We needed access to the original music stems. More importantly, it had to be a movement by the Indian music industry, for the music industry. Which it what it eventually was, with almost every woman artist participating in the movement. With us altering the most popular Indian duet songs, by accessing the original music stems itself.”

Asked about why have chosen this campaign for the festival, Akali said, “Wondrlab is built on the philosophy of ‘Platform first’. This piece of creative is the best possible example of ‘platform first’ work, that uses the Spotify platform itself, innovatively. Then, the scale of the campaign shines through – Sony Music got the most popular duet songs to the table. It was as much a movement by the artists and industry itself as it was a campaign by Spotify and Sony Music. All the artists, whose voices were removed from the tracks, themselves revealed the message. Almost every women music artist or influencer spread the playlist, while their male counterparts joined in. Supported by fan communities, it trended no. 1 on Twitter. More importantly, it started a conversation across news channels and panel discussions.”

Categories Wondrlab is going for:

Radio & Audio Lions
Glass Lions
Entertainment Lions
Entertainment Lions for music
Media Lions- Use of audio platforms

Bharat Matrimony - Case video

With the social media pressure of everything needing to be perfect and like a fairy tale, we asked -was the digital world creating pressure for perfection, that was affecting real-life partner evaluation? And this was the time when the world was abuzz with Elon Musk’s tweet on ‘scary good’ ChatGPT, and whether it would make humans redundant.

The time was right for Bharat Matrimony to tell its story of how real-life love stories don’t need artificial perfection standards. The brand found the perfect occasion to do this - Valentine’s Day, and the perfect messenger, Aaditya Iyer, an artificial influencer that lived on Instagram for 10 days. He and his world were created by AI tools like Midjourney and ChatGPT. He was perfect in all ways. But on 14th Feb it was revealed that he was not real but a work of AI. Successfully driving home the point that while there is no perfect person, there is someone perfect for you, waiting to be found on Bharat Matrimony!

Speaking about choosing this campaign, Akali said, “The AI Valentine campaign marked a significant milestone by creating India’s first fully AI-generated virtual influencer. More importantly, the timing and context of the campaign, just days after Elon Musk’s tweet, latching on to the conversations and uproar over ChatGPT, made it a campaign that was truly a part of and created by culture. And ofcourse the painstaking execution, creating every picture, every word of copy, working with experts to make it look and feel more real than AI currently delivers, through ChatGPT and Mid-Journey itself.”

Sharing the challenges while executing the campaign Akali shared an anecdote, “Aaditya Iyer spent as much time being born, as he spent living his perfect life on Instagram. A lot depended on the visual grammar being right to pull off the digital illusion. Since his images were AI-generated, they had to look consistent. A Midjourney specialist joined the journey and over the next few days, hundreds of digital illustrations were created. Telling Midjourney to generate an image of ‘a good-looking man in a café’ was not enough. Prompt after prompt was carefully crafted keeping in mind nuances like angles, scene details, lighting, camera lens, etc.”

Categories that the agency is entering:

Digital Craft – including AI story telling. Digital Illustration and Image Design
Media - Use of social platforms
Social and Influencer
Asked about expectations from Cannes this year, Akali said, “Artificial Intelligence will definitely be a buzzword at Cannes this year. Hopefully Artificial Love, will be too.”