Two Mexican advertising agencies have won a combined total of nine awards at the Cannes Lion International Festival of Creativity, a global creative communications event.

Leo Burnett México won two Lion awards, or Lions, for its Untouchables advertising campaign, while Publicis México won seven for its #SeguimosHablando (Let’s Keep Talking) campaign.

The former’s campaign was produced for Eva Center, a Mexican startup that developed a method to detect breast cancer through infrared thermography. Leo Burnett won a silver Lion for its campaign in the health and wellness category and a bronze Lion in the outdoor category on the first day of the five-day online event.

Eva Center’s breast cancer detection technology is primarily aimed at women in rural communities, where some men prohibit their wives from attending breast cancer screenings because they don’t want them to be touched or seen topless.

The infrared thermography process avoids both. Eva Center has taken its technology to 80 rural communities across 14 states and detected some 1,500 cases of breast cancer before it was too late.

Publicis México won two gold, two silver and three bronze Lions across four different categories for its #SeguimosHablando campaign, which it made in conjunction with Propuesta Cívica, a civil society organization dedicated to the defense of human rights defenders and journalists.

The multi-platform campaign calls for justice in the cases of murdered journalists in Mexico, one of the most dangerous countries in the world for media professionals. It features spoken and written messages from four slain journalists, including Javier Valdez Cárdenas and Miroslava Breach.

“The campaign seeks to demand justice for all the members of the press who have been murdered and to make this tragedy visible as a first step … [toward] concrete actions to put an end to this problem,” said Publicis Worldwide chief creative officer Diego Wallach, who worked on the campaign.

The #SeguimosHablando campaign, which began in 2019, has also won several other international advertising prizes, including the prestigious Yellow Pencil award.

With nine Lions going to the two Mexican companies on the first two days of the festival, Mexico bettered the result it achieved at the 2019 version of the event, at which five Lions were won by Mexican firms. The festival concludes on Friday.

With reports from Expansión