The Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity has come and gone without the buzz that surrounds the famous Cannes Film Festival. The Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity is the marketing/advertising equivalent of the film festival. All the biggest ad agencies vie to have their work recognized at this festival. With the more creative shops this usually will create a sort of schism between what the client wants and what the ad agency wants.

At the festival you are rewarded for your creativity and ultimately for your success, but the amount of hours that is needed to create a new refreshing and innovative piece for the festival usually will cost the client quite a bit of money. However, for the most part all the client cares about is success, and why shouldn’t they? They pay an ad agency to create a messaging platform to help the audience relate with the brand and ultimately drive recognition or sales. For the most party they don’t care how creative it turns out as long as it meets those goals of sales and brand recognition. However, it is still fun to look at all the winners and finalists and see what is going on in terms of marketing around the world.

The winner of the Grand Prix for Good went to “The Ant Rally” by BBDO Germany.

This campaign’s success hinged on the cute factor, by cutting up leaves and making them into protest banners BBDO Germany was able to make it appear as if the ants were rallying and protesting for their safety and wellbeing.

The winner for Branded Content and Entertainment went to “The Beauty Inside” by PEREIRA & O’DELL San Francisco, USA for the Intel and Toshiba.

 

The message was simple; Intel is able to put their microprocessor chips into many different type of devices, so the beauty of Intel is that it is inside. The video is about a man who wakes up every day as someone else, but he stays the same inside. The simplicity of the idea made it so that anyone from around the world could play in the part, so they opened it up to the world and got fantastic results.

“The Beauty Inside” was also recognized as a winner for the Cyber Lion and it shared this award with the “Oreo Daily Twist” by DRAFTFCB New York, USA.

 

The results of this campaign is quite outstanding, raising their Facebook likes by over 200%, raising their ReTweets by over 500%. For a company as big as Oreo, who was celebrating their 100 yr anniversary, I have to say they really succeeded in pushing their brand into the 21^st century. They were able to interact with audiences across the globe, and really make the cookie everyone loves as a little kid a cultural icon. Each day for 100 days they took a cultural reference and turned it into an Oreo cookie by forming the frosting and cutting the chocolate cookie to match it. Such a simple idea was able to garner so much interest; they ultimately took what Google does with their Google Doodle’s and brought it to Oreo.

The last award I will talk about is the winner of the Media Lion which went to “Why Wait Until It’s Too Late” by Ogilvy and Mather Amsterdam, the Netherlands for the Dela Brand.

 

It is easy to see why this campaign was able to get so much success; it quickly touches the sentimental side of everyone. Everyone in this world will have to deal with death of family, friends, or loved ones at some point in their life. Why wait until it’s too late to say something, Dela was able to get this message across and get people to say how they really feel before they reach for the microphone at the funeral. Who thought that a campaign about death would be so successful? Maybe because the Dela Brand, a funeral insurance company, was able to focus more about the life and love aspect of death rather than death itself.

If you are interested in more of the winners and finalists you can find them all here: Cannes Lions –  2013 Winners and Shortlists 

Be careful because once you start looking at these campaigns you can quickly become lost in how amazing and well done many of these campaigns are. Sadly, this festival does not get the press that it should. And even more devastating is how the majority of these, if not all of these, will never be seen by the majority of the American population. Maybe soon the Ant Rally will show up in a Super Bowl Ad rather than seeing the same unoriginal “funny” commercials that are shoved down our throats every February. One can always dream.

Sebastien Damas
Just Media, Inc.