India’s advertising industry is facing its biggest creative reckoning in years after recording its worst performance at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, winning just two Silver and three Bronze Lions against 32 awards a year ago.
The dramatic fall has triggered intense soul-searching within the industry, with leading advertising professionals warning that the setback is not simply about a poor year at the world’s biggest creative awards, but reflects a deeper crisis of credibility, originality and relevance.
“The biggest concern for our industry today is credibility,” said Sandeep Goyal, managing director of Rediffusion.
Goyal pointed to last year’s biggest Indian winner — FCB India’s “Lucky Yatra” campaign for Indian Railways, which won nine Lions, including a Grand Prix — but later came under scrutiny after critics questioned the extent of its real-world execution and consumer impact.
“Campaigns created purely for awards with little or no real impact hurt the credibility of the entire industry. This is a matter of ethics,” Goyal said, warning that unless the trend is reversed, India could see fewer entries — and fewer wins — in the years ahead.
For many industry veterans, Cannes 2026 has exposed a problem that has been building for years: agencies chasing award juries instead of consumers.
Ashish Bhasin, founder of The Bhasin Consulting Group and former APAC chief executive of Dentsu, said the industry needs to return to fundamentals.
“An ad for a fake-note detection machine cannot become our claim to fame,” he said, referring to the Bronze Lion-winning “Don’t Look Up” campaign for currency-counting brand Steadfast.
According to Bhasin, Indian agencies must build campaigns around real brands, real business problems and genuine consumer insights rather than highly crafted case studies designed primarily for award competitions.
Several industry leaders also questioned the quality of India’s domestic awards ecosystem, arguing that local competitions increasingly reward participation rather than exceptional creative work.
Naresh Gupta, co-founder and chief strategy officer at Bang In The Middle, believes advertising has also become less memorable in the digital era.
“As a collective industry, we have forgotten how to charm the customer,” he said, arguing that an obsession with performance metrics and digital optimisation has come at the cost of emotionally engaging storytelling that once defined Indian advertising.
Dhruv Sachdeva, founder and chief creative officer of independent agency Humour Me, said changing consumer behaviour has fundamentally altered the rules of advertising.
“Today’s audiences spend more time with creators than commercials. The people shaping modern advertising can’t just understand brands; they also need to understand communities, algorithms and internet behaviour,” he said.
Yet the picture was not entirely bleak. Independent agencies emerged as the bright spots at Cannes. Delhi-based Humour Me won its first-ever Lion, while four-year-old Talented added three Lions to the two it won on its Cannes debut in 2023.
“The agencies that define the next decade won’t necessarily be the biggest,” Sachdeva said. “They’ll be the ones structurally designed to preserve bold ideas from conception to execution.”
Industry leaders insist the problem is not a shortage of talent. Bhasin noted that India has produced globally recognised creative leaders such as Piyush and Prasoon Pandey and award-winning work from agencies including Ogilvy, Webchutney and BBDO.
“There is no reason India cannot produce world-class creative work again,” he said. “The industry simply needs to get back to creating ideas that solve real problems for real consumers.