In a bid to broaden its embrace of the marketing and communication industries, Cannes Lions is set to debut a health-care creativity festival – Lions Health – in 2014.
The two-day Lions Health awards will be held right before the main Cannes festival starts on Sunday, June 15, 2014. Those awards will replicate much of the main festival, with five juries to judge entries, a Young Lions contest for specialist health care creatives, and a health care Young Marketers Academy. And of course a Lions Health awards show evening.
The festival said Lions Health will cover three areas: health (communication that falls under regulatory restrictions), wellness (communications that aren’t regulated) and sustainability.
Many of the main festival contests are divided into product categories that already include a pharmacy or healthcare category that includes everything from over-the-counter and prescription medicines to anti-hair loss lotions, but they are often overshadowed by more glamorous product categories.
It’s a big market. In the U.S. alone, health care communications agencies had total revenue of $3.62 billion, according to Ad Age’s DataCenter. The biggest network by far is Publicis Groupe’s Publicis Healthcare Communications Group, with U.S. revenue in 2012 of $505 million.
This story originally appeared in Advertising Age
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