Cannes Lions: Leo India's best shots for the festival of creativity

India’s creative heads are once again ready to put out their best 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 campaigns from Leo India.

Whisper: #KeepGirlsInSchool #EarlyPeriods

Whisper’s ‘Keep Girls In School’ campaign tackled the rising pattern of girls starting their periods as early as age 8. Using music to connect with young minds, the brand launched ‘The Period Song’ to normalise periods and empower parents and teachers to educate early. Created by music icons Shreya Ghoshal and Sunidhi Chauhan, the period song got 242 million views on YouTube. The campaign also brought period education into children’s entertainment through animated films. With over 75 million views, this film aimed to spark vital conversations across India.

Cathay Pacific: Takeoff Takeover

Takeoff Takeover was the first of its kind hyper-targeted airport campaign powered by real-time flight data. With less than 1% of the category’s media budget, Cathay Pacific chose to outsmart rather than outspend. The brand turned every competitor’s takeoff into an opportunity for themselves by reaching the flyers right at their boarding gate. By leveraging publicly available information—live flight data, aircraft data, real-time airport data, and complaint data from years of social listening—the brand turned the cold data into a clear, creative and context-aware message delivered at the right place and time.

Mountain Dew: ‘Peaks of Courage’

Mountain Dew’s ‘Peaks of Courage’ campaign gives a new side to its fearless spirit—‘Darr ke Aage Jeet Hai’—by blending technology, storytelling, as well as community engagement to explain what modern adventure looks like. Apart from the iconic Everest, Nepal is also home to eight of the world’s fourteen 8,000-meter peaks, each with untold stories of bravery and ambition. Collaborating with the Nepal Tourism Board and Discovery Channel, this campaign used stories to create awareness and help hikers with a roadmap to conquer both the peaks and their fears. The brand presented this information through an immersive digital hub mdpeaksofcourage.com, accessible via QR on each bottle, offering climbers real-time data, difficulty scores, route plans, and Sherpa insights. The aim was to change the concept of adventure into an algorithmically guided experience.

PepsiCo Lays: Mitti Ki Chitthi (The Letter)

Lay’s ‘Mitti ki Chitthi’ campaign embodies the brand’s purpose of spreading joy to its consumers as well as the planet. The film is made with deep-root connection to India’s farmer-led narrative. It is the story of soil revival through a mother’s letter to her farmer daughter. It draws from the cultural belief that soil is a sacred mother, and emphasises the importance of restoring soil health. It highlights Lay’s commitment to accessible soil testing, moreover it breaks rural stereotypes by portraying a woman farmer.

“I’m proud of the effective pieces of work from this year—an amazing piece for Mountain Dew; Lays, with a big sustainability push around farming; work with P&G—Whisper, with a long-term commitment to make the right things happen; and Cathay, with outstanding data-led media work, done with just 1% of the budget of all media companies. There’s a lot of exciting work. Most importantly, every campaign is based on the vision ‘Impact a Billion’. We focused on impacting one life, then a million, then a billion,” said Rajdeepak Das, Chief Creative Officer of Publicis Groupe, South Asia, and Chairman of Leo Burnett, South Asia.