Cannes: Special Group, Orcon Win Direct Grand Prix

A campaign for broadband provider Orcon featuring Iggy Pop rocked the Direct Lions here in Cannes tonight, winning the Grand Prix for agency Special Group in Auckland, New Zealand. The 30 member Direct jury, the largest in Cannes history, also awarded 19 gold Lions, 23 silvers and 30 bronzes out of a field of almost 1,500 submissions.
  Orcon ran away with it, according to jury head Pablo Alzugaray, CEO of Spanish agency Shackleton. Orcon created a contest in which the winners helped the godfather of Punk rerecord his hit song "The Passenger" via webcam, and appeared alongside him while making the video. The results played out in real time, but at every stage of the contest, few could resist getting jiggy with Iggy. See a video of the campaign, and more Direct Lions results, after the jump.

 The category proved hospitable for the whole region Down Under: Six of the golds went to Australian agencies, including "Nothing Soft Gets In" for Toyota from Saatchi & Saatchi in Sydney and "Support Scent" on behalf of Guide Dogs Australia from Clemenger BBDO in Melbourne. Other gold winners included "World's Biggest Sign Post" for Nokia from Farfar in Sweden and "Eternal Moonwalk" for Studio Brussels from MortierBrigade in Brussels, Belgium.

  "Auditorium" for Heineken from JWT Milan, which has been widely awarded this season, won a silver. "Choose a Different Ending," an anti-knife campaign for The Metropolitan Police from Abbott Mead Vickers BBDO in London won a bronze.
"Hardchorus" for Puma from Droga5 in New York also got a bronze, the single award for a U.S. agency.

Cannes: TBWA\C\D Tops Promo, PR

Gatorade "Replay," the campaign from TBWA\Chiat\Day, Los Angeles, that restaged an old high school football rivalry years later, won two Grand Prix Lions at the first awards show gala event here in Cannes tonight. The campaign won top honors in both the Promo & Activation Lions and in the PR Lions.

Promo jury president Tina Manikas, global retail promotions officer at Draftfcb, said the jury was looking for ideas that "push the boundaries" and "evoke participation and engagement for a specific period of time."

The Gatorade campaign was unanimously chosen for the top prize in the Promo competition, which received 1,595 entries this year. "It was a really terrific idea," said Manikas. The effort brought high-school rivals from 1993 back together to replay a championship game and has since grown to include other sports and inspired a TV show. "It created an event that spread and the idea kept evolving," said Manikas.

The Promo jury awarded eight gold, 19 silver and 26 bronze Lions. JWT Italia won two golds for Heineken "Auditorium," an event that had soccer fans pleasantly surprised when they found the concert they had been dragged to by wives and girlfriends on the night of a critical Champions League match was actually a Heineken-sponsored stunt that screened the game.

BBDO New York won one gold and one silver for its HBO "Imagine" campaign, as well as two silvers for the "Cube Film Installation" portion of the effort, which projected different angles of the same story on an outdoor installation. "To show a story from different angles is a great insight and a great basic idea," said Promo juror Alexander Schill, chief creative officer and partner of Serviceplan Group in Hamburg, Germany. The campaign used various media to tell the HBO story, especially the Internet, but "it didn't end in one channel," Schill said. "They took it outside and made it visible for people walking through the city."

Other U.S. wins in Promo included a silver for Grey in New York for Canon's "Behind the Still" and a bronze for Crispin Porter + Bogusky in Boulder, Colo., for Burger King's "Augmented Reality Banners."

The PR jury was also enamored of Gatorade's "Replay." "The execution was multi-platform and was PR centric," said Paul Taafe, jury president and global CEO of Hill and Knowlton.

"Replay" is just the second Grand Prix in PR Lions, as this is only the second year the festival has given awards in the category. In all, entries were up 32 percent this year, thanks mainly to ad agencies. The jury awarded 11 gold and 31 silver Lions. No bronzes were awarded in the relatively small category, which drew 575 entries.

"Replay" earned kudos from the PR jury for its ability to earn media for Gatorade at a time when it was shifting the brand to appeal to everyday athletes, Taafe said. "It represented the ability to create an authentic conversation that appealed to people."

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