Storyboard18 | Dentsu Webchutney, VMLY&R India win Grand Prix at Cannes Lions 2022

In the 2022 edition of the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, Dentsu Webchutney won a Grand Prix in Radio & Audio Lions for its ‘The Unfiltered Tour’ campaign for Vice Media. The campaign, which is the most shortlisted Indian entry (so far), also picked up two Bronze Lions and one Silver Lion too in the same category.

In a behind-the-scenes blog for Storyboard18, Dentsu Webchutney’s former CEO Gautam Reghunath had described ‘The Unfiltered Tour’ as a “project of serious rigour and ambition”.

The key members who worked on the campaign made multiple secret visits to the museum, and spent over 18 months to put together the campaign.  Under the campaign, VICE World News and Dentsu Webchutney launched a new guided tour for visitors at the British Museum in London. Interestingly, the museum has nothing to do with the campaign directly. British Museum is home to some of the world’s most disputed artefacts. Through ‘The Unfiltered Tour’, visitors to the museum could scan these artefacts using the Instagram filters and unlock an augmented reality (AR) experience that  visually teleported the objects back to their homeland.

It’s for the first time that visitors to the museum were able to hear the story behind each artefact in the voices of experts from the countries they were taken from and not from where it’s currently housed. A moment of guerrilla genius that gave each of them an opportunity to play ‘audio tour guide’ right under the museum’s nose, said Reghunath. Taking this further, ‘The Unfiltered History Tour’ also extends into a ten-part podcast series featuring these experts, providing a broader education on the artefacts, as well as the history and ongoing impact of colonialism.