The Marketing Week: Cannes Special

CAMPAIGN OF THE WEEK

Metro Trains Australia’s Dumb Ways to Die public health campaign has been the runaway success of Cannes 2013. The campaign has earned a slew of awards including three Grand Prix prizes for direct, PR and radio.

Created by McCann Melbourne, the animated campaign has so far achieved 17 Gold awards, two Silver, one Bronze and one shortlist at Cannes Lions 2013.

The ad features a family of animated characters meeting their death in a host of stupid ways with the aim of encouraging safer driving behaviour around rail tracks and reduce the number of deaths.

It has also gained more than 50 million views on YouTube, the song from the ad topped the iTunes download charts and the campaign has been extended into an app game and spawned a Tumblr blog of GIFs.

GOOD WEEK FOR:

Creativity Cannes is an unmissable week in the calendar for marketers and agencies with awards in more than 18 categories as well as a conference programme featuring some of the biggest global names from the industry and celebs including P Diddy, Jenson Button and Lou Reed also making an appearance. More than 12,000 marketers and creative agencies from around the world headed to Cannes this week to celebrate the best work in the industry. 2013 marks Cannes Lions 60th year and there were more than 35,000 entries.

BAD WEEK FOR:

Poor old Argentina lost the final of this year’s Beach Soccer World Cup, hosted by Eurosport on the beach outside the Palais festival hall. Teams from Africa, Asia, Europe, North America and South America, battled it out in the sun in the fourth annual competition where Denmark took the title for the second year running. Almost as disappointing though was the UK teams no-show which meant we forfeited our place in the tournament.

INTERNATIONAL

Philippines: DDB in Makati City, Philippines won a Gold award in the mobile category for its Smart TXTBKS campaign for Smart Communications. It found a way to make use of basic feature phones to help children access textbooks, because smartphones and tablets are prohibitively expensive.

It collaborated with textbook publishers to convert official school texts into 160-character messages which were programmed into sim cards. It turned the oldest analog phones into e-readers and sim cards into textbooks.

France: IBM also took a gold in the media category for its ‘People for smarter cities’ campaign which turned outdoor advertising sites into useful utilities such as benches and shelters as a way to demonstrate its project that looks for ways to make cities smarter.

Russia: A Gold award in the PR category went to the URA.RU City website for its ‘Make the Politicians work’ campaign, which aimed to remind politicians it is their job to maintain and repair roads by highlighting they were more concerned with public image than their duty.

ONE TO WATCH

This week, our ones to watch are young marketers Georgia Lindsay, strategy and insight executive and Yewande Sokan, senior strategist both from MAXUS who took Gold in the media category at this year’s Cannes Young Lions awards.

The brief was to design a campaign that raised funds for international charity MSF (Doctors Without Borders). Lindsay and Sokan’s project targeted women holidaymakers with the concept ‘Just in Case’ based on the insight that women going on holiday pack more clothes than they wear because they prepare for emergencies. The campaign applies the same thinking to emergency campaigns. The work returned ROI of 2:1 – keep an eye on these two.

TWEETS OF THE WEEK

Ogilvy & Mather ‏@Ogilvy
“Sometimes the questions are complicated and the answers are simple.” -Dr. Seuss #OgilvyCannes inspire #CannesLions

Coca-Cola’s Jonathan Mildenhall ‏@Mildenhall
If You Dare To Dream Great Stories Start In Cannes 

Twitter’s Tony Wang ‏@TonyW 
“Twitter is becoming the social soundtrack for TV.” @dkroy on main stage at #CannesLions 

Rhode Island School of Design’s johnmaeda ‏@johnmaeda 18 Jun
“In advertising, story-telling is too often *story-yelling*.” —Gaston Legorburu #canneslions