Cannes Contenders 2025: Tgthr’s vision for a cleaner, safer India on the global stage

The stage is set, the stakes are high, and India’s creative powerhouses are once again ready to dazzle at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity 2025. This year, the spotlight is on bold vision, disruptive thinking, limitless innovation and storytelling that transcends borders.

As the Indian contingent steps into the global arena, we take an early look at the campaigns set to make waves on advertising’s grandest stage. In this piece, we take a look at Tgthr’s entries at Cannnes Lions.

Ultraviolette Automotive: UV Lync

Eight of the world’s ten most polluted cities are in India, with 260 million fuel-powered bikes being major contributors. While electric bikes efficiently reduce emissions, limited charging infrastructure causes range anxiety. Meanwhile, EV cars enjoy a far more extensive charging network. UV Lync by Ultraviolette enters with a breakthrough solution. This is a compact device that converts any Type-2 EV car charging point into a three-pin socket to charge electric bikes. By bridging this infrastructure gap, UV Lync aimed to empower more riders to switch to EV bikes, thereby, enabling India’s journey towards a cleaner and more sustainable future.

NPCI in partnership with Times of India: Anti Scam Shala

With digital frauds rising up to 85% in 2024, NPCI and TOI launched Anti Scam Shala in 2025, transforming scam awareness into a culturally rooted experience. In MahaKumbh Mela, attended by over 660 million people, NPCI effectively replaced the paper pouches used by vendors with the ones featuring multilingual scam-awareness ads. Distributed free to 207,000 vendors, these pouches soon became a part of daily transactions. The brand claimed that this initiative created a 174 million sq. ft. scam-awareness zone. This low-cost, yet high-impact campaign was designed to deliver education through everyday interactions in common language and context.

Speaking about the campaigns, Aalap Desai, CCO & Co-Founder, tgthr, shared, “This year’s contenders from tgthr are a demonstration of the impact at scale simple yet powerful observations can have. The ‘Anti Scam Shala’ by NPCI and Times of India leveraged a cultural touchpoint that existed for centuries – the newspaper bag. Seemingly ordinary, it became an extraordinary way to deliver our anti-scam lessons at Maha Kumbh. Ultraviolette’s UV Lync focused on the insight that EV two-wheeler owners faced range anxiety due to the lack of charging stations. In the end, proving that when a brand is boxed in by a problem, there’s always a chance to think out-of-the-box. And that’s exactly what we did.”