Ulka's Rakesh Menon on what Creative Business Transformation actually means

There is a particular kind of agency career that Indian advertising does not celebrate quite enough: the kind where someone walks in through the front door as a trainee and stays until the building has changed around them several times. Rakesh Menon is one of those people.

Menon joined FCB Interface in Mumbai in 2007, nineteen years ago, when the agency was a different-sized operation with different ambitions, and he has not left since. Over those years, the network around him has consolidated, split, renamed, and reorganised (FCB Interface folded into the larger FCB Group India, then restructured again following the Omnicom-IPG merger). Through all of it, Menon has risen steadily, from trainee to National Creative Director to Chief Creative Officer to, now, Chief Creative Experience Officer at Ulka, one of Indian advertising's oldest and most storied franchises.

Ulka itself carries more institutional memory than almost any other name in the Indian agency ecosystem. Founded in 1961 by the legendary adman Bal Mundkur and his wife Ann, the agency spent its first decades quietly doing what the best Indian agencies of that era did: building brands from scratch that would go on to define their categories. The philosophy was always rigorous, always rooted in what the consumer actually needed rather than what the client wanted to say, and that sensibility has persisted through multiple name changes and ownership transitions. It is the sensibility Menon now leads.

His own record at FCB Interface, in the two years he spent as Chief Creative Officer before moving into the Ulka role, was striking. He helped make FCB the number-one creative network in India (a distinction the agency had not previously held) and in the process delivered what remains one of the cleanest examples of creative business transformation produced by an Indian agency in recent memory: Lucky Yatra, the campaign for Indian Railways that turned every valid train ticket into a lottery entry, converting the age-old problem of ticketless travel into a behavioural opportunity. The campaign won India's first-ever PR Grand Prix at Cannes Lions 2025, along with six Gold Lions, and became the most talked-about Indian submission of the year.

It is precisely because of that track record that Menon's appointment to the Creative Business Transformation jury at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity 2026 carries particular weight. The Creative Business Transformation category is arguably the most demanding on the Lions roster: it requires entrants to demonstrate not just that the work was good, but that it restructured something: a revenue stream, a customer behaviour, a brand's role in commerce.

Menon sits on a jury alongside the CEO of FP7 McCann MENAT, the Global CCO of Flywheel, and creative leadership from Ogilvy Taiwan, R/GA APAC, and adam&eve/TBWA in the UK. He is the only Indian juror in the category, and among fourteen Indians total on this year's jury.

When we spoke to him ahead of the festival, the conversation kept returning to a single question that the Creative Business Transformation category forces every juror to answer honestly: did this idea actually change anything, or did it only describe a change that would have happened anyway?

The permanence test

The Creative Business Transformation category at Cannes has, since its introduction, struggled with a specific kind of entry: work that presents transformation persuasively without having delivered it structurally. The case study format is particularly susceptible to this because a well-made film can frame any business outcome as the inevitable consequence of a creative idea. Menon's framework for cutting through this is direct and, once you've heard it, difficult to unsee.

"Regardless of how well an idea is packaged, the jury at Cannes is astute enough to identify the real worth of an idea," he says. "And that really comes down to one thing: has the idea changed how a business creates value, or has it only changed how the business communicates that value? What you really look for in Creative Business Transformation is whether the work created a new revenue stream, a new consumer behaviour, or a new way for people to experience a brand, product, or service. Did it fundamentally shift something within the business? And most importantly, does the idea outlast the campaign? Does it have the potential to become permanent rather than temporary? The strongest work usually feels like something the business can continue long after the campaign itself is over."

The permanence criterion is the most unforgiving of the three, and it is the one that eliminates the majority of shortlisted work at the final stage. A campaign can create a behaviour (drive trial, shift perception, generate a new occasion for use) without embedding itself in the architecture of how the business operates. A transformation, in Menon's framing, does the latter. Lucky Yatra was a case in point: the lottery mechanism was not an execution. It was a restructuring of the Indian Railways ticketing proposition itself, one that the organisation could continue operating indefinitely. The creative idea was the business model.

When creativity becomes the engine, not the vehicle

The broader argument Menon makes about the Creative Business Transformation category is one that the Indian advertising industry has been building evidence for over several years, and which the global industry is only beginning to absorb fully: that creativity, when deployed with genuine strategic intent, does not merely support business growth; it determines the mechanism by which growth is possible.

"The kind of business impact that is truly Lion-worthy is the kind that genuinely depends on the creativity of the idea," he says. "If the transformation could have happened without the idea itself, then it probably isn't Creative Business Transformation. For me, the most meaningful business impact is felt beyond just numbers. Of course, growth matters, but you also look at whether the work created a new behaviour, changed how people participate or engage with a brand, or fundamentally shifted the role the brand plays in people's lives. The strongest work is usually the kind where creativity is not just supporting the business but actively shaping how the business grows and creates value."

This is a meaningful distinction from how effectiveness has traditionally been measured in the Indian market, where the dominant metrics have been reach, recall, and sales uplift, the standard outputs of a well-executed brand communication campaign. The Creative Business Transformation category demands something harder to quantify but easier to recognise: the moment where a creative decision opens up a commercial possibility that did not previously exist. Warc's Effectiveness 100 data, which aggregates the world's most awarded effective campaigns, consistently shows that the work commanding the highest commercial premium is the work that redefines the category rather than competes within it. Menon's framework names the same principle from the inside of the jury room.

The proof problem

One of the defining shifts in the awards landscape over the past several years has been the increase in scrutiny applied to results claims. The era of the unverified case study (where a compelling narrative and a strong creative idea could carry an entry across the finish line without rigorous substantiation of outcomes) has largely passed. Menon confirms this evolution from a juror's perspective and goes further than most in describing where the new standard actually sits.

"Absolutely," he says, when asked whether juries are getting tougher on innovation that lacks real-world impact. "In many ways, Creative Business Transformation is probably the category where the results of a campaign are scrutinised the most. The jury is not just looking at how innovative an idea sounds. It is looking at whether that innovation genuinely translated into real-world impact. There is definitely a much higher level of scrutiny today around proof, scale, adoption, and whether the transformation actually lived beyond the case study itself. The strongest entries are usually the ones where you can feel the impact even before the results start appearing on screen."

That last observation of feeling the impact before the results slide is a juror's instinct that cannot be taught. It is the product of knowing enough about how businesses work, how consumer behaviour actually shifts, and how creative ideas propagate through culture, to recognise immediately whether the mechanism of an idea is genuine or constructed after the fact. The Indian advertising industry's growing credibility at international awards shows is, in part, a consequence of producing more work where this instinct fires correctly: campaigns where the idea and the outcome are so structurally linked that no further explanation is needed. Lucky Yatra was of that kind. The Unfiltered History Tour was of that kind. The industry is producing more of them.

Trajectory, not delivery

Menon's view on long-term effectiveness is the clearest expression of how the Creative Business Transformation category differs from Creative Effectiveness, its older sibling on the Lions roster. Where effectiveness asks what the work delivered, transformation asks what it made possible, and the timeline is different.

"It's not just important, it's the core of the category," he says. "Creative Business Transformation isn't about a campaign that performed well. It's about an idea that changed the trajectory of a brand or a business. So the jury needs to see very clearly how the work has the potential to impact the future, not just what it delivered in the past. If that long-term potential isn't visible in the work, it's very difficult to call it a transformation."

The emphasis on future potential over past delivery is significant because it changes the nature of what the jury is actually evaluating. A campaign can have extraordinary historical results and still not be transformative if those results are a product of spend, placement, and the right moment rather than a structural shift in how the business creates value. Equally, a campaign that has only been running for a short time may qualify for the category if the mechanism of the idea is clearly durable.

The jury is, in this sense, asked to perform a kind of commercial analysis that sits closer to strategy consulting than to traditional creative evaluation. The presence of a judge whose most awarded work was precisely this kind of mechanism-based idea (an idea that restructured a behaviour at scale) suggests the category is in capable hands.

Brilliance at mass

Menon's vision of what he hopes the category will produce more of (and reward more loudly) is, perhaps unexpectedly, not a call for greater complexity or deeper innovation architecture. It is a call for scale.

"I personally gravitate towards the kind of work where the brilliance of the idea is instantly visible," he says. "You can feel it almost immediately. Cannes is a celebration of creativity, and I would love to see work that celebrates that creativity at scale. Not just ideas that work for a niche audience, but ideas powerful enough to influence millions of people and create change at a much larger level. I think that is when transformation becomes truly exciting — when creativity is not just clever or innovative, but capable of creating impact at mass."

This is a calibration that the Creative Business Transformation category has historically struggled with. Some of the most architecturally sophisticated transformation work (the kind that builds new commercial models, creates proprietary data assets, or engineers entirely new product experiences) operates at relatively low scale by design, targeting specific segments with high precision. That work is often technically impressive and commercially significant. What Menon is describing is something different: a transformation that is powerful enough to move mass behaviour, to shift how millions of people relate to a brand or a product or a service. In the Indian context, where scale is both the opportunity and the challenge, this is the most demanding brief in advertising.

Ulka, the agency Menon now leads, was built on exactly that premise. Its most iconic work was always work that moved markets, not just metrics. As Menon takes that institutional memory into the Cannes jury room this June, the question he will be asking every entry is the same one Ulka has been asking its own work for more than six decades: does this idea have the potential to change something that matters, at a scale that matters, in a way that endures? The bar has never been higher. He is one of the few people in the room equipped to hold it there.