Savlon's 'Healthy Hands Chalk' wins Creative Effectiveness Grand Prix at Cannes

The Creative Effectiveness Grand Prix for Savlon's Healthy Hands Chalk Sticks by Ogilvy Mumbai produced little controversy in the jury room, but President Fernando Machado, global chief marketing officer of Burger King, sees plenty of room for improvement in the data judges get to make decisions.

The ingenuity of the product idea was key to the win. Children in India have little access to or interest in using soap to wash their hands. And they tend eat everything with their hands--rice included. But they do use chalk boards at school. So the ITC-owned brand developed chalk infused with soap that would bubble out when kids wash their hands, helping combat widespread disease.

The jury voted unanimously, Machado says, but spent "a lot of time discussing the criteria." For Savlon, the focus was on the product rather than the other marketing, but that's in part because of incomplete information that makes it harder to judge in the category, which is open to campaigns that shortlisted or won in prior festivals.

The idea is to leave time for market results and results data, but jurors felt case studies could be better "in terms of having more discipline and showing the idea and the result," Machado says.

He would also like to see entrants allowed to redo their case-study videos, which now have to be ones entered the prior year and may be outdated. He'd even like to see client and agency present to the jurors, as in some other Lions categories, because they had questions. When jurors know the people involved, they can reach out to ask questions, but he says that's unfair to entrants who don't know the jurors.