The empty Champagne bottles have been cleared from the beach: Cannes is over for another year. And as the advertising industry creeps back into work, it’s worth thinking about what an event like Cannes can tell us about our industry (apart from that we like a party).
At the first Cannes Lions in 1954 there was only one award: cinema advertising. (The awards were also held in Venice, but that’s another story). Apart from some changes, the competition stayed pretty static through to 1995, when the ‘Young Lions’ were introduced.
Over the 20 years since then, the Lions have changed beyond recognition, adding award after award to reflect a new (and much more diverse) generation of advertising. In just the last three years we’ve seen the advent of the ‘Branded Content & Entertainment Lions’, the ‘Mobile Lions’ and the ‘Innovation Lions’. And recently, digitally-focused categories have been added to the Outdoor, Direct, Design, Media and Promo contests.
In 1995, brands thought mostly about cinema, TV, radio, outdoor. The Festival’s ‘Creative Marketer of the Year’ that year was Heineken. And this year, Heineken was chosen again: the first brand ever to win the award twice. Twenty years is a long time between drinks — and Heineken’s advertising reflects huge change. It’s now virtually unthinkable for a brand to win the award without a digital ingredient.
Heineken has stayed on top of their game partly because they have ensured their marketing is fit for a digital age. For example, they partnered with Uber in Sydney to open up special local experiences to people who signed up for an adventure on their mobile. They took advantage of the longform capabilities of YouTube to create a spot showing people in Mexico being presented with the option to watch the Champion’s League final live in London - provided they left immediately for the airport.
The creative industries have never had so many outlets for their work. Digital technology is opening up a whole new world of creative expression and problem-solving. Optus found success at Cannes with a shark-detecting buoy. So did Pedigree New Zealand, using mobile phones to help recover lost dogs. And brands are using the longform potential of YouTube to create more and more engaging spots that people want to watch, like Nutri-Grain’s seven minute short film about blind Brazilian surfer Derek Rabelo.
Incredible stories told with creative excellence. No matter what the medium, that’s a formula that works just as well in 2015 as it did in 1954.
By Bart Jenniches
Industry director at Google Australia