The Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity is a global event for those working in the creative communications, advertising and related fields. It is considered the largest gathering of worldwide advertising professionals, designers, digital innovators and marketers.
The seven-day festival is held yearly in Cannes. Each June delegates from 90 countries visit the Festival to celebrate the best of creativity in brand communication, discuss industry issues and network with one another. The week’s activities include four award ceremonies as well as an opening and closing gala.
Creative Effectiveness Lions recognise creative work that has produced a measurable and proven impact on a client’s business – creativity that affects consumer behaviour, brand equity, sales, and where identifiable, profit. It will aim to establish a direct correlation between creativity and effectiveness.
In this blog, I’ll be sharing my Top 10 Creative Effectiveness Lion Award Winners from 2015. Hope you enjoy!
Monty’s Christmas, John Lewis, ADAM&EVEDDB – Grand Prix
Racking up 1.8m views on YouTube on its first day of release, John Lewis’s much-anticipated festive offering tells the heart-warming story of a friendship between a boy and his toy penguin, Monty.
It has now amassed an astonishing 19m views.
Smellcome to Manhood, Old Spice, WIEDEN+KENNEDY Portland – Gold Lion
The concept is that Old Spice will make you smell like a man, which will make ladies treat you like a man, which will make your mother cry.
#MACITBETTER, McDonald’s, DDB Sydney – Bronze Lion
Everyone loves Big Mac Sauce. So for the very first time, McDonald’s took the sauce outside the burger. They produced limited edition bottles, auctioning #001 on eBay. It sold for over $20,000. They then challenged Australia to ‘mac’ anything better with limited edition Special Sauce tubs. Which they did in their thousands, ‘Mac’ing’ everything from fish and chips to sushi.
I Will What I Want, Under Armour, DROGA5 – Silver Lion
Under Armour set out to launch its most expansive women’s campaign to-date with the brand platform “I WILL WHAT I WANT.” Droga5 was tasked with creating an empowering and beautiful space for Under Armour Women’s brand to grow. “I WILL WHAT I WANT” speaks to women who do not wait for permission, advice or affirmation from others in order to go after what they want.
Share The Load, Ariel, Procter & Gamble India – Bronze Lion
The ad was created by BBDO and is told from the perspective of a father who watches his career-minded daughter come home from work and clean up for her husband. As he composes a letter to his daughter in his mind, the father laments how stereotypes and his own behaviour have contributed to her situation and vows to change.
Madden NFL 15, EA Sports, HEAT San Francisco – Bronze Lion
The campaign played up the innate sense of rivalry in gamers and football fans in an over-the-top music video that showed Kevin Hart and Dave Franco engage in an increasingly ridiculous game of one-upmanship. Then came the “Madden Giferator,” an innovative digital play that combined live National Football League data with Madden NFL 15 game footage to create a personalized live stream of GIFs based on game players’ favorite teams.
Christmas Is For Sharing – 1914: A Christmas Truce, Sainsbury’s, AMVBBDO London – Silver Lion
Last year’s Christmas campaign unlocked the insight that Christmas is not just about the gifts you give, it’s about who you share it with. This translated into a brilliantly simple idea for Christmas 2015: Christmas is for sharing.
What better and more symbolic demonstration of Christmas is for sharing than two opposing sides coming together to share the Christmas spirit. The creative idea was to work in partnership with The Royal British Legion, a long-term Sainsbury’s partnership, to dramatise the ultimate expression of sharing at Christmas. The moment when British and German soldiers laid down their arms and came together on neutral ground on Christmas Day 1914 to share greetings, treats, mementos and even a game of football.
Infrequent Flyers, Tigerair, McCann Melbourne – Silver Lion
The Infrequent Flyer Club is essentially a CRM platform that allows Tigerair to keep Infrequent Flyers up-to-date with great deals to great destinations, and fulfil its mission of putting more people in the sky. The first 5,000 members that joined received a free flight voucher for $100.
An integrated campaign including YouTube and other paid media channels, out-of-home, radio, social media, airport advertising and at-airport and on-plane activation that drove traffic to the website.
Raising Eyebrows and Subscriptions, The Economist, Proximity London – Gold Lion
The campaign sought to provoke new readers into trying relevant sample content for themselves, and experience their own ‘Economist epiphany’. Potential readers were nudged towards targeted content, site registration and ultimately subscription.
The strategy followed a three-fold approach. The Economist first used digital display with provocative headlines to show its insightful take on unexpected topics. It then targeted the intellectually curious as they investigated these subjects, linking to articles on economist.com from places the audience already found their current affairs. Finally it developed an innovative ‘next best’ content model to present personally targeted articles.
The World’s Toughest Job, American Greetings, Mullenlowe Boston – Bronze Lion
The card company American Greetings scored a viral hit with its campaign for Mothers’ Day. The Boston agency Mullen, which created the online campaign, posted a fake job vacancy for a director of operations at Rehtom Inc and then held webcam interviews. Applicants were told about the arduous nature of the job – which involved working around-the-clock hours and was unpaid – before the interviewer revealed that he was talking about motherhood.