134: Brilliant ideas raise questions
Award Show Season, Part 2: Cannes Lions-winning ideas that stood apart
How would we have come up with an idea like that?
Why would we have approved and funded an idea like that?
What’s energizing and useful about creative award show season is the plethora of strategies, concepts and craft to discuss. And if you’re not taking a moment to evaluate a few award winners, that too is worth evaluating.
As discussed Monday, the 2024 Cannes Lions competition welcomed over 26,000 entries from marketers and agencies around the world. Pretty much every marketing scenario is represented. And the range of creative problem solving is fascinating. Here are a few of my favorites from Days 1 and 2. Full list of winners via The Drum.
Day 1 featured results from the Outdoor category. (Worth noting this category refers to a lot more than traditional printed billboards alongside the freeway.) Of the two Grand Prix winners in Outdoor, I thought Pedigree stood out for solving several business and technical challenges leveraging various kinds of AI. The final result is a means of affecting their entire media buy and content database, while also addressing the brand’s longstanding purpose of ending dog homelessness. Kudos to Colenso BBDO from Auckland, New Zealand.
God love an AI-infused campaign, but also hats off for brutal conceptual simplicity—even if technology helped execute. Ogilvy New York won the Grand Prix in Print & Publishing for their Recycle Me campaign for Coca-Cola. It is no mean feat to create a remarkable idea for a 130+ year old brand. More coverage via Contagious, and here’s a case study video.
Day 2 brought results in Design and various categories of Craft. Circus Grey out of Lima, Peru took top honors in Design for a concept which more or less asks, “how can we promote a cement manufacturing company and create good will?” Creativity to the rescue for Cemento Sol; also a story of patience—the effort took over two years to implement. Case study here.
Maybe an even greater challenge than elevating a cement brand is getting the attention of media buyers. The Grand Prix in Digital Craft went to FCB New York and Spotify for Spreadbeats (case study video here). Reinventing a core business function—the longstanding B2B Excel spreadsheet, both the bane and necessity of the media buying industry—is quite impressive.
And we’ve got a rather in-depth report via Reddit from a first time Cannes Lions Advertising juror. Worth a read to see this juror’s responses to questions. Here’s how they described the evaluation process:
We each scored (online) 200+ pieces of work subdivided into various subcategories (music videos, live experiences etc.) We didn’t all seethe exact same pieces so I think in total there might have been 300+ works.
The works with the highest average scores were placed into a second round of judging (also online) and we had to score these according to specific metrics (strategy, craft etc) keeping in mind the main focus of the category and subcategories.
This was followed by 2 in-person days of judging where we holed up in a room for 9 or so hours each day and debated (often hotly) the merits or flaws of each piece.
3A. On the first day we whittled down the highest scorers from “2” down to the shortlist, which was publicly released.
3B. On the second day, we chose 16 pieces from the shortlist to elevate to “bronze or higher” status, then chose 8 from the 16 for “silver or higher” status, 3 from the 8 for “gold or higher”, then those 3 were scrutinized repeatedly and with much argument before we voted on the grand prix entry.
We were really exhausted at this point, but our jury president made sure that we only moved forward when we were absolutely fucking certain that we would not regret our decisions.
The Grand Prix choice was very much a philosophical one as the winner would be an indication of the soul of the festival and what sort of message we wanted to send out.
In the end, even though not all of us got our personal choice, we were satisfied that we did justice to the entries and that no matter what, everyone was deserving.
Last but not least is the Grand Prix in Entertainment/Sport from agency Marcel, Paris’ WoMen’s Football idea for Orange telecom (case study here). Their strategic challenge: How might Orange highlight its decades of equal support for both men’s and women’s soccer football? The VFX-driven idea both reveals and revels in the hypocrisy of sexism in sport.
AI+Creativity Update
🤖🔊 New from Google’s DeepMind: Video-to-Audio technology which can, “generate an unlimited number of soundtracks for any video input.” In other words, the system watches video to generate frame-by-frame prompting which fuels the generation of “a dramatic score, realistic sound effects or dialogue that matches the characters and tone of a video.” It’s important because the majority of text-to-video currently produces video only. Now imagine this nascent tech becoming practical: You type a prompt for a video, and the workflow generates video AND music, SFX and even dialogue that synchs. The impact on low-investment video creativity will be tremendous.
🤖🏠 Intriguing case study from Addition on advancements in image-to-image controls, given the need from brands for fine-grained control.
🤖🎥 Meanwhile there’s another generative video platform making a splash. Luma Labs announced its Dream Machine tool this past week—lengthy story via Mashable. One of our guest speakers at MCAD, Kelly Boesch, has been experimenting with Dream Machine, and producing beautiful clips. Here’s my quick result for the prompt “Advertising executives celebrating the Cannes Lions creativity competition.”