Media in Canada and Strategy are on the ground in Cannes, bringing you the latest news, wins and conference highlights all week long. Catch all the coverage here.
When the Media Lions jury gathered behind closed doors in Cannes this year, they were looking to see if “media is driving creativity, not just delivering a creative message.” That was the north star that jury president Dan Clays, CEO of Omnicom Media Group U.K., instructed his group of experts to pursue. More often than not, they found the answer in work that hacked the system in surprising ways. And few opportunities were more ripe for a cultural hijack than Marvel’s Deadpool & Wolverine.
Rethink and Carat Toronto’s “Can’t Unsee It” campaign – which cleverly aligned Kraft Heinz Ketchup and Mustard with the character duo from the blockbuster film – was awarded a prestigious Gold Lion on Wednesday evening, one of only 12 top accolades in the Media category. Speaking with Clays in Cannes, the media exec told strategy that the work intelligently helped drive cultural momentum around the film, rather than simply attaching the brand to it. “They rode the wave of the marketing campaign for the movie and infiltrated the IP so that they could create their own mustard-ketchup trailer that mimicked the film’s advertising,” Clays said.
The campaign also came “very close” to winning the Grand Prix. “It was definitely in the conversation. It brilliantly represented intricate media planning and multichannel thinking. But Dove edged it out because it hit a sharper nerve, thematically. It tackled something deeply relevant to marketers right now.”
The Dove work crowned with the Grand Prix was its “Real Beauty redefined for the AI era” piece by Mindshare New York. The work highlighted (in the hopes of lessening) the negative impact of AI when it comes to altering women’s images. To do this, the team created prompts to help people generate more inclusive and realistic images using AI. “We wanted to see a real balance between technology and human ingenuity,” Clays said to reporters in Cannes. “It wasn’t about brands using AI for AI’s sake, it had to unlock something bigger.”
The Dove work did that in spades.
The jury spent three days pouring over nearly 2,000 entries from 67 countries. In the end, they awarded 66 Lions to 20 countries, with FMCG brands leading the way collecting about half of those wins. When the jury gathered to deliberate on the work, they “didn’t want to arrive with a rigid checklist of criteria,” Clays said. “We wanted to recognize marketers who are being bold and ambitious, because it’s become hard to do in today’s performance-driven environment. We wanted [to award a diverse] portfolio [where] people look at this year’s Gold-winning work and say, ‘That’s my kind of problem. And that solution makes sense to me.'”
Small hacks with big impact
During the Media Lions news conference on Wednesday, Clays spoke about awarding “entrepreneurial” brands that found new platform opportunities. He pointed to the “Boxed Ads” campaign for Mercado Libre by Gut, in which the team purchased the outer edge of OOH boards where other brands were buying inventory. Instead of taking over an entire ad space, they created a small frame around competitor products and paid just 50% of the media fee. “It was smart, surgical media thinking,” Clays said.
Community as a media lever
Another thread this year involved brands using media platforms as tools for mobilizing communities. Reddit appeared in multiple campaigns, including one that was given a Gold for French automaker Škoda. The brand and its agencies, PHD and Leo in London, tapped into a passionate Reddit community r/CarTalkUK (where the brand’s Octavia vehicle is lovingly dubbed “Our Lord and Saviour”). It created a “Reddit Car Share” where members test-drove the new model before anyone else. The auto brand then turned their reviews into ads for social, OOH and other platforms.
Vaseline also gathered around a community on social media through its “Vaseline Verified” campaign, which saw the brand set out to correct misinformation about how to hack its product, providing credible data in a world rife with harmful pseudoscience. “They didn’t just join the conversation, they moderated it.”
Connected commerce stands out
Finally, Clays pointed to the rise of connected commerce, highlighting the “Coupon Rain” campaign out of Colombia as a prime example. Knowing that the moment the winning team lifted the trophy after the Mercado Livre (a club football championship) would be the most-photographed moment of the match, it embedded coupons into falling confetti – turning photos of the celebration into shoppable media. “That’s what connected commerce can do when it’s part of the brand narrative, not just an endpoint.”
