McDonald’s, Budweiser land Canada’s first Lion statues of the year
Start the trophy tally! Tribal DDB and Anomaly both won Silver Lions at the first awards gala of the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity Monday night.
Both agencies won in the Promo & Activation competition, which had seen three other Canadian agencies shortlisted for the award.
Tribal DDB’s “Our Food. Your Questions” campaign for McDonald’s Canada was viewed by the jury as “truly remarkable,” said Karen Howe, senior vice-president and creative director at One Advertising and a Promo & Activation juror.
“In a category with over 3,000 entries, to pull in a silver is extraordinary,” Howe said. “We applauded a client that was brave enough to embrace that kind of idea, and the agency that executed it. It’s a big idea they sold, and it was executed beautifully.”
The campaign, which earned the fast food brand Best of Show honours at the recent Marketing Awards, allowed customers to ask any question they wanted about product quality, service and problems they may have had with the company. A variety of McDonald’s employees would respond to questions directly either through social media or videos distributed online.
“As it went around the jury table, one of the guys who works for McDonald’s in another country said ‘I wish we could talk our client into doing that,” Howe said. “That really made me proud.”
Tribal’s silver came in the Best use of Social Media Marketing in a Promotional Campaign category.
Anomaly Toronto’s “Budwesier Red Lights” for Labatt Breweries of Canada was the night’s second Canadian winner. The campaign that put wifi-connected hockey goal lights in people’s homes won in the category of Best New Product Launch/Re-Launch or Multi-Product Promotion.
Howe said the jury felt this was another example of a client doing brave work.
“It was an incredibly well-loved submission,” she said.
“What we admired as jurors was the great idea, how it tapped into the human psyche… and a client brave enough to buy that. But at the end of the day, it was an extremely strong category. A silver in that category is a tip of the hat.”
The Promo & Activation Grand Prix went to Ogilvy Brazil for a sport team’s activation that drove its die-hard fans to become organ donors. The “Immortal Fans” program positioned organ donation as a way of making individuals and their love of Brazil’s Recife football club live forever.
More than 50,000 fans signed up. While Brazil previously had a 1,000-person organ waiting list that had been hampered by an inefficient system of donation, “Immortal Fans” reduced the waiting list to zero.
Although it bears the markings of a pro-bono or charitable campaign (which would make it ineligible for a Grand Prix), it was a paid campaign for the Recife football club.
Rob Schwartz, creative president of TBWA\Worldwide and jury president, said the jury wanted to – despite the integrated nature of most modern campaigns – give the Grand Prix to “work that was uniquely of this category. It must be something that could win in this category and this category only… We wanted dividers between the other categories in the show.”
