Ajay Gahlaut on the making of Cannes Lions winner ‘The Unfiltered History Tour’

Close on the heels of the announcement of the launch of Dentsu Creative, dentsu’s global creative network, at Cannes Lions 2022, Dentsu Creative India is having a fantastic run at the premier advertising festival. The agency’s work, titled ‘The Unfiltered History Tour’, done for Vice Media, has notched up quite a few metals, including a Grand Prix in the first two days of Cannes Lions 2022 alone.

‘The Unfiltered History Tour’ won the Grand Prix in the Radio and Audio Lions (Branded Content/ Podcasts sub-category), along with 1 Silver and 2 Bronzes on Day 1. On Day 2, the work fetched Dentsu Creative India a Gold in Digital Craft Lions (Personalised Storytelling & Experience subcategory).

In a special interaction with Adgully, Ajay Gahlaut, Group Chief Creative Officer, Dentsu Creative Services, elaborated on the making of ‘The Unfiltered History Tour’ campaign, the creative thought behind the campaign, executing the campaign through the challenging circumstances during the global pandemic and more.

Gahlaut remarked that ‘The Unfiltered History Tour’ has been an extremely long campaign in the making, taking about 18 months to come to fruition, from the time the idea was germinated to the time everything was executed – all executed through the pandemic. Besides, it involved a “humongous” number of people, with each person having an important role.

“That’s the interesting part about the campaign, because this is not like in the early days, where we would do a press ad or a film and there would be a writer, an art director, at most a film director, and that was the end of that. Now you have technologists, you have people who create the technology, who think up the technology, you execute it, you do it on ground and remotely. So, it was a huge exercise,” Gahlaut reminisced.

According to him, it is miraculous that something like ‘The Unfiltered History Tour’ was able to be executed amid challenging circumstances. Gahlaut recalled how there were times when the Chief Innovation Officer would be on call with a client of Vice Media, who would be in the British Museum and sending him a feed from Instagram to allow him to create a filter.

At the same time it had to be done without anyone coming to know about it, “because ultimately it was like an underground kind of an effort, because if the British Museum would have known, they wouldn’t have liked it” remarked Gahlaut.

All this was created within the pandemic period over the phone. So, anything that would take an hour to accomplish, under these circumstances it would go up to 10 hours, simply because of such a long distance and so much of a gap, he added.

“However, it’s all come together beautifully and now, when you look at the campaign, all of us feel really proud that something like this could be accomplished by an agency out of India. It makes us feel proud to be Indians, that we were able to do something so tech heavy and pull it off under such difficult circumstances. Any agency in the world, the most cutting edge digital agency anywhere in the Western world, would be proud to have Unfiltered as part of their portfolio. So, it’s been a long journey and now it’s giving us the rewards that it truly deserves,” remarked Gahlaut.