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Titanium & Integrated Grand Prix |
Canada’s Cannes trophy case has five more Lions inside, including a Film gold, but the space set aside for 2009 Integrated & Titanium trophies will remain empty.
Barack Obama’s White House mantle, however, has a new addition.
At the final awards show of the 56th International Advertising Festival in Cannes, Taxi’s most recent TV spots for Viagra won one of 16 Film competition golds.
Three executions—“Antiquing,” “Strolling,” and “Reading”—won as a campaign for Pfizer Canada.
The ads showed how the titular obsessions of each spot tended to become less important after couples tried the little blue erectile dysfunction pill.
“In everything we looked at, we were looking for something new,” said Janet Kestin, a Canadian Film jury member and co-chief creative officer at Ogilvy & Mather. “The hardest thing to do is to take [a long-running campaign] and make it new all the time. The incredible genius of Taxi over the years is taking something you can’t talk about and finding extraordinarily different ways to talk about it… It felt fresh and new and insightful.”
Cossette Toronto won silver in Film for its General Mills’ Pizza Pops campaign—“Karate Chop,” “Monkeys” and “Robot Friend”—which reveals the unfortunate, messy consequences of underestimating how much filling a Pizza Pop has. The robot friend, for example, explodes when his roommate carelessly tosses him one of the microwavable snacks. The room is covered in orange sauce as a result. And Toronto’s Doug Agency also won a Silver Lion for its “Scooter” ad, part of the “Shorter is better” campaign for the Canadian Film Centre’s Worldwide Short Film Festival.
Thirty-six silvers were awarded in total.
Among the 35 bronze winners, BBDO Toronto won for Tropicana Tropics’ “Taxi” spot for client Pepsi-QTG Canada; and two of Ogilvy & Mather Toronto’s Diamond Shreddies ads for Kraft—“Graph” and “Letters”—won as a campaign.
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During early deliberations when the jury was divided into groups to weed-out non-short list material, these ads ended up in a group judged by Kestin.
“I was prepared in my mind to give my little speech about it,” said Kestin. “There were six people other than me [judging], and they howled with laughter. I didn’t even know it was on the short list until the short list came out. Everybody in the room laughed and totally got it even though half of them didn’t know the back-story at all. I was stunned by that.”
There was a single Film Grand Prix winner: Tribal DDB Amsterdam, whose “Carousel” online film for Philips’ cinema-proportion television impressed the 22-member jury with its interactivity. It won the top award by a unanimous decision. “It’s a film that, by itself, it quite brilliant and beautifully executed,” said jury president David Lubars, chairman and chief creative officer of BBDO North America. “But if you watch online (Cinema.Philips.com) and roll your cursor over it, you realize there are films within the film demonstrating the Philips TV set… It’s what we call a magnet. In other words, work that’s produced today might draw viewers in voluntarily. They’re no longer just passive victims watching television.” (Carousel also won a Cyber Silver Lion on Wednesday.)
Additionally, Believe Media’s “Wassup ’08” film was given a special jury commendation. Because a client did not back it, it was not eligible for medal consideration. The spot revisits the characters of Budweiser’s original “Wassup” campaign as their lives are ruined by war, unemployment, health costs and dwindling investments in the closing days of the Bush presidency.
It ends with one character seeing hope for the future in then-presidential candidate Barack Obama.
“It’s an extraordinary piece of work,” said Bill Bungay, a jurist from the U.K.’s Beattie McGuinness Bungay. “It absolutely captures eight years under Bush. But unfortunately there are rules, and the rules are every single piece of work needs to be commissioned… We felt it was so significant it really needed a special mention.”
On the hotly anticipated Titanium & Integrated winners list, Obama For America won both Grand Prix by unanimous agreement—the first time one campaign has won the Titanium Grand Prix and the Integrated Grand Prix.
Spearheaded by campaign manager, and Cannes keynote speaker, David Plouffe, the Obama campaign has been lauded as a breakthrough in political campaigning, using social and online media to rally grassroots support, and raise funds that would go towards mainstream media executions.
“It was like a world award,” said Rich Silverstein, co-chairman of Goodby Silverstein & Partners, one of three American Titanium & Integrated jurists. “Obama was a movement, and it wasn’t an American movement. It was a world movement. I think we all felt that.”
“It’s a public service campaign, and traditionally public service campaigns don’t qualify for Grand Prix,” added Prasoon Joshi, a jurist from McCann Erickson in India. “But we all decided that Obama as a ‘brand’ can. It’s the first time consumers co-created a brand with the brand owner. It was something which, as an industry, we could not ignore. It’s purely a brand campaign.”
Jury president David Droga, founder of Droga5 in New York, said election campaigns are usually very formulaic. The Obama campaign deserved top honours because it broke with tradition.
“Isn’t that the best of what the Titanium is meant to do, make things better?” Droga asked.
Titanium Lions, created in 2003 to award “groundbreaking and innovative” integrated marketing concepts, went to Crispin Porter + Bogusky for Burger King’s “Whopper Sacrifice,” Droga5 for “The Great Schlep” (for which Droga himself was ineligible to vote), and Bartle Bogle Hegarty in New York for the Oasis album launch “Dig Out Your Soul.”
Droga described the Lion winners as campaigns that “started a movement, and that movement can be for change or to sacrifice your friends on Facebook.”
An Integrated Gold Lion wa
A second Integrated gold went to Goodby Silverstein & Partners for its “The Now Network,” a program for U.S. telecom Sprint.
The Titanium & Integrated winners’ list is dominated by American agencies and organizations, which won 11 of the 15 trophies. The U.S. had by far the most submissions in the category with 98 out of the total 403. The U.K. was next with 38 submissions.
Canada entered 21, but left the competition without an awards statue.
Ogilvy & Mather, however, was shortlisted for its play Body & Soul, created as part of Unlever’s Pro-Age campaign for Dove.
Only 23 entries were selected for the Titanium & Integrated short list, the fewest of any competition in Cannes.
“I think Canada is coming up with really big ideas,” said Steve Mykolyn, chief creative officer at Taxi, and Canada’s Titanium & Integrated jury member.
“The fact that we had something on this short list—keeping in mind it was the shortest of shortlists—means we are thinking in that realm already where the big idea and integration is a very big part of the communication. Canada is doing a great job.
“There were a substantial number of entries from Canada this year, and a lot of discussion about them. It comes down to what’s going to make the shortlist. That’s like winning a medal in any other category.”
Cannes Lions wraps up tonight with a gala party following the awards presentations.
This story has been corrected. Doug Agency was originally credited with a Bronze Lion, when in fact it won a Silver Lion.
