Being True To Brand: Jury Prez Devika Bulchandani On Creative Effectiveness

“The thing about the creative effectiveness category is that we are not looking at something for the first time but the jury is analysing the work already done,” says Devika Bulchandani, the global chief executive officer of Ogilvy, who was tasked with leading the Creative Effectiveness Jury at the 70th Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity.

The creative effectiveness category essentially looks at winners of the last year and analyses the difference this work has made to the business in the marketplace. The Grand Prix winner in 2023 is Ogilvy India’s work ‘Shah Rukh Khan - My Ad’ that was done for the Mondelez brand Cadbury Celebration.

The work won a Titanium Lion, considered among the highest honours at Cannes Lions, last year.

“Our Gold winners and the ones that rose to the top were all food brands, in fact, businesses that are fundamental to the human condition and have an impact in our lives in a much more granular way,” explains Bulchandani sharing the jury experience.

“You can get into effectiveness and lose creativity and so we looked at that as well. Did you create economic value for the brand and business? Was it creative enough to push boundaries? That balance was interesting in the room, benchmarking creativity and giving us a holistic view of effectiveness and scale,” the jury president says.

Speaking on the Grand Prix in particular, she says the question also was whether it was true to the brand and innovating for it. “The Cadbury work had a massive cultural impact as well. It was a classic example of personalisation at scale in a creative manner that finally tilted the jury decision in its favour,” informs Bulchandani.