Red and James Ready take the stage
Another awards show, another award for James Ready and Leo Burnett.
This time it’s a Silver Lion in the Cannes Lions Promo & Activation competition for the “cap recall” program; a quick and clever response to the accidental release of James Ready bottle caps which lacked the customary words of wisdom and advice for consumers. The campaign won gold, silver and bronze at the One Show in May, the most recent of many awards for Leo’s James Ready work in recent years.
Joining them on the Promo & Activation winners list is Proximity, with two Bronze Lions for the “Find Red” program for Mars. The campaign saw red M&Ms scattered around Toronto just ahead of Google’s cameras rolling through the city capturing images for Google Street View. Three of the M&Ms made it into Street View and Proximity launched a digital treasure hunt challenging consumers to find them.
The Grand Prix went to BV McCann Erickson in Bucharest. The campaign was for chocolate bar Rom which comes wrapped in the Romanian flag (a problem when targeting young consumers who preferred “cool” American brands). The solution: wrap Rom chocolate bars in the American flag. The Stars and Stripes wrappers generated massive discussion and media coverage across the country. Feelings of patriotism were stoked and people demanded the return of the Romanian flag wrappers which, of course, reappeared on shelves one week later.
In all, there were 55 winners in the competition, including five Golds.
“I think there are three words that sum up this category. Those three words would be creativity without borders,” said jury president Warren Brown of Australia’s BMF at the morning press conference to announce the winners.
He said he asked the jury to look for work that was unexpected: “Like meeting your best friend for a drink and finding out they’ve had a sex change.” The Rom campaign did that, he said.
Overall, Brown said many of entrant agencies mistook technology for great ideas. “A lot of people thought having a Facebook page was an idea,” he said. Simply giving things away or holding an event and hoping people will tweet or blog about it isn’t an idea, he said.
Canadian judge Christine Dacyshyn of Ogilvy & Mather said the M&Ms campaign was a good example of work that started with a truly original idea.
“In this category you need technology to make it work. If you used technology in an innovative way obviously that is recognized, however it can’
t just be technology based. It has to have a strong, strong idea,” she said.
