Cannes Contenders 2018: DDB Mudra

Believe your entry deserves a Lion? Send us the work and the case

whatsapp 0 whatsapp 0 Facebook 0 Tweet 0 linkedin 0

With the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity 2018 just a couple of weeks away, Campaign India returns with its 'Cannes Contender' series.

The premise is:

How much time really does a Cannes juror get to understand a case or piece of work s/he hasn't come across before?

Too little. It's up to us to help them get acquainted with the good work prior. We present here entries from Indian/South Asian agencies that their creators believe will be in contention for Lions at the 2018 International Festival of Creativity.

DDB Mudra has two such entries.

Project Free Period - Stayfree

Most women hate their periods. It’s inconvenient, it’s painful and it restricts their everyday. Even more so in India. Here, girls drop out of school at the onset of periods. Women on their period are considered impure and disallowed entry into temples or even their own kitchens. And the list goes on and on. It’s all of this that continues to drag the topic of periods deeper into the dark corners of society.

But for one community of women, periods are a welcome break. These are the women in the sex trade. While periods, for them, come with the same set of biological inconveniences, they actually looked forward to it. Because it was the only time of the month where they are not forced to work.

Stayfree as a brand has always stood for normalising periods in the lives of women. Here we found an opportunity to use periods to normalise the lives of women in the sex trade.

We turned their 3 days of periods, or 3 days of no work, into 3 days of learning. Introducing Project Free Period. A skill training workshop, where we took economically sustainable skills and compressed them into 3-day modules. So that they can use their period days to skill themselves in another trade.

To be able to scale the positive response from our early workshops, we later opened this initiative out to the world and invited volunteers to help us train. This earned a lot of media for the initiative and a lot of love for the brand. This also helped us refresh our curriculum with new skills, thereby attracting new students.

Puma Suede Gully

Hip-hop is the father of street culture, as we know it. And the Puma Suede is considered the most influential sneaker in hip-hop history. And that’s why for over 50 years, Puma Suede has built itself in every country by associating with its street culture.

But the street culture in India was very, very underground. So much so that the face of India’s street culture, Divine, was unknown to even his own city.

So Puma decided to create it’s own street. And called it Suede Gully.

A collaboration between Divine and his friends from all walk of street culture – rappers, dance crews, graffiti artists, visual artists, street fashion gurus. Together they created India’s biggest street collaboration across 4 cities and 4 languages.

A collaboration that spoke about the struggles that the street culture goes through to express it. A thought captured in the words “Mere joote mein tu chal ke toh dekh” or “Try walking in my shoes”