Grand Prix, Part 3: Modern Marketing At Cannes Lions 2024
Grand Prix, Part 3: Modern Marketing At Cannes Lions 2024
The one where the real magic gets debunked.
Read this in the style of your favourite news anchor. (I’m channelling John Oliver as I write.)
Controversy erupted last week about the awarding of the Print & Publishing Grand Prix to Coca-Cola’s “Recycle Me” campaign by Ogilvy New York. Critics, including marketers and climate activists, have accused the Festival of “rewarding greenwashing”, and “contributing to a growing mistrust of the awards overal”.
The Jury President, John Raul Ferero, predictably, continues to back his jury’s choice, offering arguments centred purely on the “creativity” of the work rather than considering its broader role on the business and society.
Adweek’s Kathryn Lundstrom has the full story, including some pretty gory details on Coca-Cola’s “progress” on sustainability. But those who’d read Part 2 of my series would remember my view on the work. Specifically that the campaign lacks customer-centricity, shifting the onus on sustainability to the customer while continuing to be the world’s largest plastic polluter.
For those of us who weep at the ad industry’s downward spiral, it’s far from encouraging to hear well-known senior creatives operate with a narrow view of work. Recently, Sir John Hegarty applauded Apple’s infamous Crush ad for “getting noticed”, completely ignoring the wider ramifications it hints at, as the world undergoes its third Internet revolution.
As long as Cannes Lions continues to perpetuate advertising’s cycle of rewarding work - and the people who build it - on the insular basis of pure “creativity” - the industry will continue to spiral.
And I will continue to weep for the industry I love.
Now, back to our regularly scheduled programming.
Entertainment x Gaming: Xbox - The Everyday Tactician
Customer-centric? ✅. Fuck, yes! Take the user base, that passionate Xbox x Football community, and bring them into the real world. What a brilliant way to tap into fandom and community. Take a bow, you absolute geniuses!
Cultural relevance? ✅. Take the world’s greatest sport - the subject of a recent, highly acclaimed streaming series - and build something incredible around it? Another “Fuck, yes!”
Gets noticed? ✅. How could it not?
Measurable results? ✅. Earned media. Increase in gamers. The most-played football manager game ever.
Is this Modern Marketing? ✅. Time for one last “Fuck, yes!” and I’m done. This is one campaign I wish I’d done.
Entertainment Lions x Music: Diageo- Errata at 88
Customer-centric? ✅. Sometimes, great campaigns pick up on insights that customers themselves hadn’t thought of. The results show this is one such example.
Cultural relevance? ✅. Undeniably so.
Gets noticed? ✅.
Measurable results? ❌. The media coverage they display in the case study makes exactly zero mentions of the brand - it’s all about Alaide. The web results are all about her too (rightly). The campaign worked for her. But the impact on Johnny Walker is unclear - the one business metric they mention feels a bit wishy-washy.
Is this Modern Marketing? ❌. The work ticked the boxes on idea and execution. But without meaningful results, it’s not good enough.
Entertainment x Sport: Orange - Women’s Football
Customer-centric? ✅. Beautiful insight into what holds people back from watching most women’s sports.
Culturally relevant? ✅. Again, tapping into the world’s most-watched sport, just a few weeks before the Women’s World Cup.
Gets noticed? ✅. Yes. The earned media coverage, 200M organic views…it all adds up.
Measurable results? ✅. The campaign clearly drove more attention for the women’s game…and thus for the sponsor.
Is this Modern Marketing? ✅. Mais oui!
Film Craft: Hornbach - The Square Meter
This one was awarded purely for its craft, so I’ll skip the analysis. But I just had to share it because it’s absolutely gorgeous and totally deserved that Lion.
Industry Craft: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung - The 100th Edition
While this is a craft award too, I will spend a moment analysing it. For reasons that will become clear as you read.
Customer-centric? ✅. Continuing the newspaper’s long-running tradition of inspiring its readers through the world’s icons, at a critical moment in German politics.
Culturally relevant? ✅. By default.
Gets noticed? ✅. The distribution and conversation potential for this kind of an idea is baked in.
Measurable results? ❌. The goal of the work was to inspire readers to remain informed and proactive in the face of historical and contemporary challenges (AdsofTheWorld). But they showed no way to measure that.
Is this Modern Marketing? ❌. Sadly, no. The work is great. But the impact is unclear.
We have three more editions to go, and I hope to close out this series by next week, and get back to my planned publishing schedule after that. See you in your inbox, later this week.
Samit