Many campaigns hit a high point despite starting with a bad idea.
The Advertising Council of Australia and Val Morgan took four Australian jury members to the Cannes Download event at Hoyts cinema to discuss the highlights, lowlights and advice from the 2025 Cannes festival.
The event highlighted 60 minutes of award-winning work from the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity and spoke about the highlights of the Cannes experience, from the jury to the Young Lions.
Dentsu NZ CCO’s Mike Felix said many of the high achieving campaigns succeeded by committing to an almost terrible idea.
“You'll notice that a lot of those ideas, if they hadn't been committed to, wouldn't be even close to what they were,” Felix said.
“(Progesso) Soup drops, for example. How would they convince someone to make soup drops? They can take something that seems almost like a joke and put everything behind it.
“The Telstra (Better on a Better Network) is another one. All of those ideas were committing to something that seemed like a bad idea initially.”
When conducting research on why agencies may receive backlash for some campaigns, Felix found that authenticity became a priority for consumers.
Publicis Groupe ANZ CCO Dave Bowman said that there’s a need for brands and creatives to ‘relentlessly put work into ideas that keep levelling up, and equally, leaning into communities and diving into it.’
“The Skoda (Reddit Edit) piece was another example of that, where the easiest thing in the world would have been to make a brochure and go, 'what would you like in the car?” Bowman said.
“But they went to a place where it could have gone horribly wrong or right and just dove into it head in.”
Ogilvy Singapore's ‘Vaseline Verified’ campaign won the Grand Prix in the Social & Influencer category, which WPP Media ANZ’s CEO Aimee Buchanan said is another example of a brand punching above its weight.
“The Vaseline Verified work lent into all things that could go wrong with their product and turned it into an opportunity,” Buchanan said.
“There's a deep understanding of the environment that they are executing in. The blue tick, the unboxing, the mechanisms influence that social commerce.”
Being part of a panel of jurors from across the world meant having nuanced discussions on the quality of campaigns and how it may resonate differently with audiences.
Suncorp’s EGM brand & customer experience, Mim Haysom, said that a primary learning experience was being part of those discussions.
“The ELF beauty (So Many Dicks) campaign was really contentious,” Haysom said.
“In the first round of shortlisting it ranked highly in pretty much every category it was in. But once we were in the room debating all of the work holistically together, it dropped out of quite a few categories.
“Some people didn't feel that it was a very sophisticated use of data and therefore shouldn’t be awarded in a data-based category.
“What was more interesting was the importance of cultural background. What I thought was a genius play of words, some people on the jury found offensive.
“It challenged me on the gender equality conversation and helped me question my own perspective on it.
Buchanan, a juror for the media category, found that a primary debate in the judging room was understanding what’s truly considered ‘media’, after a video game ,The Final Exam, was submitted into that category.
“70% of entries come from creative agencies and you've got nine media professionals dissecting the media elements of the campaigns,” Buchanan said.
“What ended up happening on The Final Exam is that a lot of people didn't feel like it was truly media.
“And the debate became this philosophical conversation around what is media. Where we landed is that we need an expansive view on what media is, could and should be, and that we can't look at it in a traditional, linear sense.”
Bowman said that part of the positive change over the years is reinventing the categories at Cannes.
“There's a long history of work that doesn't fit anywhere,” he said.
“Reinventing the categories at Cannes leads to more interesting stuff being produced.
"I think we had 20% of work in categories that didn't exist last year.
"That's definitely a positive change over the last few years."
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