CANNES, FRANCE — Creative agency Wondrlab India has set its sights on the prestigious Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity 2023, happening from June 19 to 23, by submitting two groundbreaking campaigns. With an unwavering commitment to innovation and creativity, Wondrlab has pushed the boundaries of advertising with “The Unheard Playlist” for Spotify and “Artificial Love” for Bharat Matrimony.
The Unheard Playlist
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 left people wondering what they had just heard.
The message was revealed by the respective women artists whose vocals were 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’s industry is incomplete without women artists. This Women’s Day, spread our songs, support women artists, make us heard…”
To start a conversation on the underrepresentation of women in the Indian music industry, Wondrlab cleverly silenced women’s voices to make them heard. The agency submitted this campaign in the following categories for Cannes Lions 2023: Radio & Audio Lions, Glass Lions, Entertainment Lions, Entertainment Lions, and Media Lions.
Artificial Love
Bharat Matrimony, the world’s largest online matrimony service for Indians, has facilitated millions of marriages, but the youth has slowly begun to question this formalized union. Government data showed a 33% increase in singles below 30 years between 2011 to 2019. A clue emerged in GWI data which revealed that one in three young Indians believed there is too much pressure to be perfect on social media. Was the digital world creating pressure for perfection that was affecting real-life partner evaluation?
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.
On Valentine’s Day, Wondrlab introduced 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 the agency made the surprise announcement that he was not real but a work of AI.
“At the launch of Wondrlab, we defined the agency as ‘platform first’ and decided to help brands win in the marketplace through work created specifically for platforms like Meta, Insta, Spotify, and LinkedIn. 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,” Amit Akali, CCO and Co-Founder of Wondrlab, said. “It’s no surprise that both 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 on those platforms and 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.”
Bharat Matrimony made the case that while no perfect person exists, someone perfect for you does. Wondrlab entered this campaign into the following categories: Digital Craft, Media, and Social & Influencer.
