Between the pages

ADVERTISING: If O&M has cracked the Cannes code, credit its creative grip of a split-screen audience.

Ogilvy & Mather (O&M) is no stranger to awards, nor to reading between the, er, lions. At Cannes, it has just picked up a silver award in the public services category for its print campaign on adoption for an organisation called IAPA.

It's a doublespread. On the left page is the interior of a posh home. On the right, a bootpolish kid in squalor. But wait, there's a transparent acetate sheet in between "" with just the kid's image, superimposed on the street.

Turn the page over (the acetate), and lo "" the kid's at home, with his books and destiny in the firm grip of his hand. It's so so Cannes, you almost hear the sound of Shankar-Jaikishen's Nanhe munhe bachhe... 1954 tune play in the background.

The ad owes much to embedded memory in other ways too. "As a child," says Sumanto Chattopadhyay, group creative director, O&M, "I saw a baby dumped in the garbage. That image has always haunted me ever since."

Then one fine day, he heard an adoptive parent explain his motivation: "One less abandoned child on the streets of India". The creative idea suggested itself, and with Kunal Sawan's art direction, it made its message clear.

"In earlier campaigns, we looked at the softer side of adoption," adds Chattopadhyay, "But this year, we looked at the darker side of things over which there's been a mantle of silence in our country."

The adoption campaign is not as globally explicit as McCann's Coca-Cola twin crate-stack ad that won in 2003, note award followers, but it is still so so Cannes.