Cannes Lions 2016: Key trends

Category blur

With awards falling into 17 categories, it seemed there were more disciplines than ever to recognize, but campaigns were also becoming harder to classify. “We now operate in an industry where there’s such blurred lines between what is PR, what is media, what is creative,” said Nick Waters, jury president for the Media Lions and CEO Asia Pacific at Dentsu Aegis Network.

Waters referred to the Media Grand Prix winner, Burger King’s “McWhopper” campaign, as a “media kit in disguise.” When Burger King reached out in print and online to McDonald’s offering to create a hybrid sandwich in recognition of the International Day of Peace, the news media went wild with the story, amplifying it many times beyond what would have been achievable with paid media.

“We felt this really lived through the media,” Waters said. “What was really impressive for us was the ability to use media to whip up momentum, change direction, course correct … it was a really skilled piece of work, using the levers of media to amplify.”

Another genre-defying campaign was “Brewtroleum”, created for the New Zealand beer brand DB Export by Colenso BBDO. While the campaign won the Grand Prix in the Outdoor category, an award traditionally dominated by billboards, Brewtroleum involved far more than roadside visuals. The campaign raised the issue of food waste, with the brand creating a 98-octane fuel using leftover ingredients from the brewing process. The liquid was then distributed at filling stations, positioning DB Export as the beer of choice for “eco-conscious Kiwis.”

The female factor

“In the last two years, the conversation around gender parity has reached a fervor that was not there before,” said Meredith Kopit Levien, chief revenue officer at the New York Times Company, speaking at The Girls Lounge, a female-focused relaxation and inspiration space that pops up at thought leadership events worldwide. During Cannes Lions, the lounge occupied a large suite in the Martinez Hotel. “The conversation is happening in more places, by many more people,” she noted.

“However, there’s still insufficient action happening,” Levien continued. “What I’ll say is that in the sum total of my experiences being part of the conversation, the only things I can point to where I can see that real progress is being made is where individual leaders take action.”

It was a sentiment evoked throughout the conference as speaker after speaker called on the industry to go beyond rhetoric and implement lasting change leading to gender equality.

Madonna Badger, founder of the agency Badger & Winters, discussed #WomenNotObjects, her campaign to eliminate objectification of women in advertising. Badger worked with The Girls’ Lounge and ABX Advertising Benchmark Index to understand how ads that objectify women actually affect key campaign objectives. “It had a negative effect on every KPI across every consumer group,” she said. “It is disastrous to your brand reputation and extremely damaging to purchase intent.”

Cindy Gallop, on the other hand, focused on the upside of using sex more realistically at a panel called “Foresight Meets Foreplay”. “Our industry has not even begun to see the power of what we can do with sex through the female creative lens,” said Gallop, the founder of MakeLoveNotPorn.tv, a platform representing sex as it happens in everyday life. Brands were “spectacularly failing to acknowledge” that people have sex in beds, in cars, and even on kitchen counters, she said.

“Our experience of sex applies to many not obviously sexual products and brands,” Gallop continued. “We help out consumers when we acknowledge and de-embarrass an area of normal activity.” (For more, see our Future 100 report, which talks about the Un-tabooing of Womanhood now underway in 2016).

Meanwhile, the Glass Lions, a category created to “recognize work that implicitly or explicitly addresses issues of gender inequality or prejudice,” went to a campaign by Mindshare Mumbai featuring transgender people.

The project for Brooke Bond Red Label Tea involved creating 6 Pack Band, billed as India’s first-ever transgender pop group. The six-person group was assembled from India’s population of hijra, a group considered to be a third gender in Indian society that has long been a target of discrimination.

“For us this year, gender inequality is not only a women’s issue,” said Madeline Di Nonno, CEO of the Geena Davis Institute for Gender in Media and jury president for the Glass Lion Award category, explaining the decision.

“The brand is 113 years old,” Di Nonno continued, “and for a brand that’s that established and a household product to take on the issue of transgender people from the perspective of how do you embrace it, how do you combat gender norms … their approach was incredibly inventive.”

Many of the award-winning campaigns throughout the festival addressed the issue of gender equality around the world. JWT Colombia’s “The Last Mask,” a campaign for the Natalia Ponce de León Foundation that rallied the country around preventing acid attacks against women, earned a Gold Lion in the PR category.

AI campaigns

Artificial intelligence has caught the public’s imagination in 2016 as technological reality begins to catch up with sci-fi fantasy. This was equally true at Cannes, as judges rewarded projects that made creative use of machine learning and artificial intelligence.

“What an honor to be presiding over a category that we think is a game-changer,” said Tash Whitmey, Creative Data Lions jury president and Group CEO at Havas helia. The Grand Prix in the category went to The Next Rembrandt, a campaign by JWT Amsterdam for the Dutch bank ING. The project used “deep learning” algorithms to analyze more than 168,000 painting fragments by the 17th century master to create a new work that replicated the depth and creative spirit of Rembrandt’s own works to a surprising degree.