‘India has the potential, but we didn’t push ourselves enough’

As the only music composer on the Entertainment Lions for Music jury at Cannes Lions 2026, Subhajit Mukherjee brought a unique perspective to one of the festival’s most culturally diverse judging rooms.

The Mumbai-based composer and sound designer, whose work spans brands such as Kia, Coca-Cola and Star Cement, joined creative directors, record label executives, streaming platform representatives and producers from around the world to evaluate the year’s best music-led creativity.

Excerpts from the conversation:

Tell us what your experience was like as a jury member for Entertainment Lions for music at Cannes Lions this year?

It was fabulous. It was a really great learning experience for me - to be in a room full of brilliant, creative thinkers from across the globe and from different professional backgrounds was incredibly enriching.

Even though it was the Entertainment Lions for Music jury, not everyone was a musician. I was the only music composer on the jury. As a composer, you tend to look at music from a technical perspective. But there were creative directors, people from record labels, artist management professionals, representatives from streaming platforms, and producers from the production side.

The perspectives that came to the table—and the conclusions we eventually arrived at—were truly global. It was fascinating to see how people from different cultures and backgrounds reacted to the same piece of work and what they valued in it.

Being a juror for a Cannes Lions category was hugely exciting, and it was an incredible learning experience for me.

They usually say that when you’re a jury member at Cannes Lions, it’s a very gruelling task and you’re holed up in a room from morning to evening. But in your case, you had a good opportunity, you were listening to good music all day.

Absolutely. It was one of the best experiences. I had also heard from a lot of fellow creatives from India, as well as from jurors who had served in previous years, that the jury room can sometimes get very tense and heated.

But our room was the best category. It was the best room. We had the best jury members and the best president, Matt Murphy from 72andSunny. He was a pure person. The way he handled everything was amazing, and things never got heated up.

There were a few situations where things became a little tense, but he would make everything so easy and polite. It was really an eye-opening experience, and also a brain-opening one.

This is a category where we won a silver last year for Coca-Cola, ‘The Girl Who Played The Tutari’. This year, we didn't even get a shortlist. What do you think went wrong, and I'm sure there were Indian entries that came your way, which didn't make it. Would you like to tell us about where we fell short?

A lot of people might hate me after this, back in the country. In the first round, there were 10 people in our jury, and the entries were divided among us. The few Indian pieces of work that came my way, if I had to compare them with the other work in the category, I genuinely felt that, creatively and execution-wise, they just weren’t there yet. At least not when compared to some of the other pieces of work. I couldn’t be biased towards our country. But yes, I think we missed out on some juice, or some creativity, this time around.

Is it the technical part of it? Is it the connection with the brand? Or is it just the hook factor that was missing? 

I’m not saying it was about the connection with the brand. It was more about that feeling you get when you see a piece of work and think, ‘I wish I had been a part of this. Why didn’t I think of that? Or simply, wow.’

It has happened with work from India before. I’m not boasting, but I’m proudly saying that with our MP Tourism work, a lot of global people would come up to me and say, “What have you done? Oh, that photograph.” People from across the globe still remember that work. I also heard a lot of people talking about the Jindal Steel work.

There has to be a piece of work that comes along and makes you go, ‘wow, this is it’. I just didn’t see or hear anything like that from our country this year.

Do we have the potential? Absolutely. In fact, we may have more potential than a lot of other countries. But this year, maybe we just didn’t push ourselves enough.