How to Bewitch a Cannes Jury

While it could get a few Indians frothy at the wrong end, it’s pretty obvious why the jury at Cannes loves Gillette’s campaign.

If a save-the-world campaign is too hard to pull off, a shave-the-world campaign will do. Or so the Cannes Lions advertising festival seems to have concluded. BBDO India, an ad agency, has won a couple of silver awards at Cannes for ‘Shave Sutra’, a Gillette 360º PR effort aimed at getting women to shave (their men, by the look of it, though one can’t be sure). Now, what exactly the jury got to see is still unclear, but the award-clincher might well have been a two-minute adfilm that went viral on the internet some time ago: The Himalayan Snow Bear. Google it.

‘The Himalayan Snow Bear,’ it begins, is ‘one of the many positions from the ancient Shave Sutra, practised by women in 200 BC to make their men shave every day.’ The aim of this routine, declares a turbaned guru who has mastered the ancient treatise, is to make men “more muscular, sexier”. For an instant demonstration of Gillette’s Mach 3 Turbo Sensitive razor, on comes a young man with a face that seems starved of sex and a chest that looks positively pubic in terms of hair overgrowth. “The only thing worse than hairy nipples, is scary nipples… so shave around the nipples with caution,” says the guru, as he instructs a bikini-clad babe by his side to lay on the lather and shear her hairy hunk without a flinch. The seductive swish of the triple-blade razor—a design that has even inspired car grilles such as Honda City’s—proves bewitchment enough for time to warp and her to lose count, but lest she sensitively sets about liberating a third nipple, the adfilm cuts to a snapshot of her shaven hunk’s sexual success. ‘Shave Sutra,’ goes the sign-off, ‘The pleasure of shaving together.’

Phew! While it could get a few Indians frothy at the wrong end, it’s pretty obvious why the jury at Cannes loves Gillette’s campaign. On Afaqs.com, the jury’s chief commends it for turning a ‘low-involvement’ (adspeak for dull) product interesting. Indian adfolk, meanwhile, seem somewhat struck by its audacity. Not by the sexual promise in itself; this is the land of the Kamasutra. Rather, by the ad’s refusal to play to the Indian family gallery, a no-no around here for all practical purposes.

“In contrast,” says an adperson, “take Cadbury Dairy Milk’s ‘kuchh meethha ho jaye’ campaign, the karela spot, with the hubby asking what’s for ‘meethha’ after dinner. It makes its point with such sensitivity and subtlety within a family setting. It works so sweetly, but wows no one at Cannes… would love to eat my words, though.” Indeed, so would many of us!

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Aresh Shirali