Grey Canada is having a very good year at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity. Having already won in Mobile and Outdoor competitions, it added another silver Lion to its tally Wednesday night in the Press competition.
Y&R Toronto also won a Lion – a bronze in the Radio competition – for Ford‘s “Avocado” spot.
Grey’s award comes for its Moms Demand Action For Gun Sense In America campaign, a program led by print work showing young children holding powerful firearms. The “Red Riding Hood” execution, for example, shows one child holding a copy of the book while another holds a gun. The copy reads: “One child is holding something that’s been banned in America to protect them. Guess which one.”
Elspeth Lynn served as a Press jury member for the U.K.’s M&C Saatchi, but was long a fixture of Toronto’s ad community, most notably as a founding partner and senior creative at Zig. She said the provocative ads spurred intense discussion in the jury room and nearly won a gold.
“Everyone loved the campaign and thought it was really strong because it had really surprising information,” Lynn said. “There was no question about the idea, message or art direction. There was a little confusion about the copy, which in one ad was a bit misleading.”
Referring to the “Red Riding Hood” execution, she said a quick fact check revealed the book had been banned in schools, “not all of America. A few people made the point that they’re taking the truth and stretching it a little bit to make the ad more dramatic… That’s the only reason it didn’t get a gold. It’s such a shame, because there was such love for it and it stood out as one of the best campaigns overall.”
The Press Grand Prix went to TBWA\Media Arts Lab for its iPad Mini campaign. The covers of popular magazines were replicated in print ads showing them on the iPad mini’s e-reader app. So a prospective shopper would see the magazine’s cover on newsstands, and see the same cover on the back of the mag, only smaller, to show the relative size of the product.
“It has no claims, no titles. It just placed the product on the bottom of the ad – that says it all,” said jury president Marcello Serpa, CCO at AlmapBBDO. “It’s not only very simple and clean, but it has a kind of guerrilla feel to it. It goes inside an old media proposing its death, and at the same time offers a cure.”
Radio
Y&R Toronto’s Radio bronze was awarded for Ford’s “Avocado” ad, which sells Ford-branded replacement parts with a clever script. To show how a shoddy generic filter can let impurities through an oil line, the script lets random words (like avocado) through the narrator’s description of the product.
“‘Avocado’ is a very clever spot, very funny,” said Canadian jury member Jean-Francois Bernier, CD at Alfred in Montreal. “It’s simple and very well crafted… There wasn’t much discussion, it just went through. It’s solid, good radio.”
The work had previously been awarded at the 2013 Marketing Awards.
The Radio Grand Prix was a concept already familiar to festival attendees and juries – the three-minute song Dumb Ways To Die. The PSA song for Australia’s Metro Trains was referred to as a sort of super-jingle by jury members, who, like other juries before them, swayed and sang along as it was presented to the press before the awards gala.
Having instructed his jury to strip away the YouTube success and expansive integrated campaign around the song when considering its merits, Ralph van Dijk, jury president and founding CD of Australia’s Eardrum, said “at the end of the day, you still get a beautifully written, simply executed, effective way of reaching teenagers with a piece of branded content they’re not going to forget.”
