The India camp at Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity is celebrating the Healthcare Agency of the Year that was crowned to India-based healthcare specialist Medulla Communications. For Praful and Amit Akali, the brothers who run the agency, while the win was overwhelming, it was also something that they planned for after ranking number three agency at the Lions Health Festival last year.
In a conversation, Praful Akali, Founder-Director, Medulla highlighted the significance of collaboration between creative and planning, and the role that medicine specialists play in healthcare communications. At Medulla Communications, the agency has set up a medical process than can take care of insight, idea and execution. “A typical agency structure comprises creative and planning team. We have added this third component that can get into a doctor’s heart and a patient’s head. What is more important though is how these three teams work together – that is what makes the difference,” he said.
For Amit Akali, Chief Creative Officer, Medulla Communications, the campaign that brought Medulla two Gold Lions, ‘Last Word’, was personal and close to heart. “We lost our mom to Cancer 10 years ago. She told us she didn't want to go to hospital and instead enjoy her last days with the family. So when Palliative Care came to us, it was natural for us to do this,” he said. Another point that Amit Akali made was that after the agency’s achievements in the Festival last year, which was the first time that the agency had even participated in an awards platform, it planned to do better this year. “We looked at some of the winning work last year, the kind of work that the top two agencies had done and we worked on how we would focus on our work to really stand out,” he said.
The team’s passion resulted in creative solutions that are now globally recognized and applauded. One key lesson that was highlighted on the first day of the Festival is the need to constantly put people first. While India is still waiting for its own WeChat or WhatsApp, there are lessons from the Tencent experience that apply well to the Indian communication industry too.
China’s Tencent Holding has a single mantra – put users, whether it their convenience or their experience ahead of all else. At the centre of WeChat’s growth and plan is the mobile internet – an area that is rapidly being adopted in India as well. Tencent’s Corporate Vice President Davis Lin stated that mobile internet has transformed all aspects of doing business and driving growth in China.
“China has been faster in adopting mobile internet. We needed an app tailored to that. WeChat is designed to connect people to services, institutions and businesses. Since Tencent is all about the users, we decided to make WeChat not mobile-first but mobile-only,” he said.
The other learning from the WeChat experience was to roll multiple functionalities in the same app in comparison rolling out different apps. WeChat not only connected friends and families for messaging but also aimed to be a centralised source of information. Tencent set up measures to ensure that all companies registering with WeChat were authentic so users could trust the companies they connected with and could trust WeChat as a platform. WeChat formed relationships with other businesses so that users could do a lot more with just one app. The philosophy has so far worked well as evidenced by the 763 million users that the platform boasts of today.
The first day of the Festival celebrated the closure of Lions Health and the beginning of another week of discussions and debates on trends that are defining the marketing and advertising business.
