Cannes| Outdoor Grand Prix winners

The Outdoor Lions jury awarded two Grand Prix for the first time ever this year, recognizing one ambient execution and one traditional poster campaign at the gala event in Cannes this evening.   Anomaly, New York, won the Grand Prix for its Diesel "Be stupid" billboard campaign, a series that celebrated risk-taking with headlines like "Smart may have the brains, but stupid has the balls." And Del Campo/Nazca Saatchi & Saatchi in Buenos Aires, Argentina, won the Grand Prix for its "Teletransporter" for Andes beer, an ambient execution that provided a soundproof booth (outfitted with sound effects) from which bar patrons could call their significant others and pretend they were not, in fact, at the bar.   Outdoor jury president Tay Guan Hin, regional ecd of JWT Asia, said rewarding two different types of outdoor advertising was necessary because of the evolution of the industry and allows traditional two-dimensional campaigns to compete "on even ground" with technologically enhanced ambient pieces like the Andes entry. In years past, "the ambient work was clearly overshadowing the traditional pieces," he said, pointing to past winners like HBO's "Voyeur," which won the top prize in Outdoor in 2008.   Diesel's "Be stupid" manifesto is "bold, fresh, lively and goes against the flow of conventional thinking," said JWT's Hin.   U.S. juror Kathy Delaney, chief creative officer and president of SapientNitro added: "What the campaign did beautifully was create a tone of voice and manifesto for the target. It was one of the campaigns that did not rely heavily on technology to get the message out, and it was very strong in its voice, tone, manner and DNA."   The jury praised the Andes execution for its understanding of the core male and the execution's universal appeal. "We've all been there," said U.K. juror Jon Williams, chief digital officer EMEA at Grey. "And as long as your communication is based on genuine insight, then you'll score."   Ambient executions won 11 of the 17 gold Lions awarded in Outdoor tonight, a sure sign that the creativity in the segment is flourishing, said Hin.   "If we were poets, [billboards are] haiku. It's the idea expressed in the most profound way," added Grey's Williams. "Now, we move into different uncharted territory. It's where digital meets life. That's what makes it exciting.  [It's something] to watch for the future."   In addition to Anomaly's top prize, U.S. agencies picked up three more Lions in the Outdoor competition: BBDO in New York won a gold for the cube installation in its HBO "Imagine" campaign; Wieden + Kennedy in New York won a silver for an ESPN Monday Night Football interactive storefront; and Johannes Leonardo in New York won a bronze for Daffy's "Underground Puzzle."

Cannes|Media Grand Prix Winner 2010|Canon Australia

Leo Burnett in Sydney took home the Media Grand Prix at Cannes for its "EOS Photochains" work for Canon Australia. The jury praised the campaign for its savvy use of paid media to lead people to an engaging online experience that tapped into the power of social media.

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."

Bynolyt| dont look!

How the world spends its time online

Sensodyne| Pack

• Advertising Agency: Grey Brazil
• Creative Director: Guy Costa
• Art Directors: Lucas Heck, Ricardo Sarno
• Copywriters: Fernando Silva, Filipe Medici
• Photographer: Marlos Bakker
• Published: February 2010

Hawaiian Tropic|Extreme Waterproof.”

“Hawaiian Tropic. Extreme Waterproof.”

• Advertising Agency: Grey Chile, Santiago, Chile
• Creative Directors: Miguel Angel Cerdeira, Carlos Guerra Oviedo
• Art Directors: Miguel Angel Cerdeira, Patricio Céspedes
• Copywriter: Carlos Guerra Oviedo
• Illustrator: Ricardo Sal

Gatorade Mission Control

Speaking at MediaPost Communications' OMMA Social day-long forum, Bonin Bough, director of digital and social media at PepsiCo whom established a "Mission Control Center" for Gatorade that takes the brand's pulse 24/7. The center, which looks very much like a NASA control room, tracks in real time analytics for campaigns, Web sites, or social channels. Bough says the focus is on creating the largest sports brand in the world and one that goes beyond the liquid product.
"The question is," he said, "how do we create this in terms of real time insights?" The center has six monitors and five people across different functions.
Recent such experiments include a Twitter and TV media strategy for the one-off Pepsuber ad during this year's Super Bowl. "We ran in isolation of paid digital media," he said of the effort. "All we did was Twitter and drove nearly the same amount of traffic [as with paid digital]. Just with Twitter. I believe in doing small experiments and rolling them out in a big way."
He noted that the Trop50 program started as a partnership with BlogHer, which has a combined reach of 15 million unique visitors. The company created The Juice online community around a "More of what you want, less of what you don't" theme.
"We tracked versus traditional to see if we could prove that if we co-create something with a community around health, family, and relationships, we could improve brand awareness, equity and volume. When we looked at digital metrics, it was through the roof."
Bough said PepsiCo is going to start a program this year wherein consumers who scan bar codes on PepsiCo products via smartphones will get content about the brand or corporate goodwill programs.

Frooti>>>> engagement >>>> brand growth

To promote the attributes of this fruit juice made from natural and juicy mangoes, Parle Agro wanted to go beyond the standards of TVC. The agency CreativeLand has designed an integrated campaign based on a series of stunts.

Hidden cameras have been installed in over 30 Indian cities, to attract the attention of the public into fear. At the falls and landslides giant mango (about 2 meters), the teams were filming the "victims" with them about the trap and provide a sample of Mango Froot. In addition, some of the scenes were recorded subsequently became the new TV spots for the brand. A very nice reuse of TV a PR stunt, which allows better retention of the brand and its message.

Credits: 

Ad agency: CreativeLand Asia

Ambush marketing

As would be expected, along with increasing viewership and increasingly prohibitory sponsorship costs, ambush marketing has developed into an art form. FIFA says such tactics "lack decency and creativity." Indecent? Maybe. Uncreative? Anything but. Highlights in ambush marketing history include: 1984 Olympics: Kodak sponsors TV broadcasts of the games as well as the US track team despite Fuji being the official sponsor. Fuji returns the favor in kind during the Seoul 1988 games of which Kodak is the official sponsor. At the 1992 Barcelona Olympics Nike sponsors press conferences with the US basketball team despite Reebok being the games’ official sponsor. In the greatest ambush marketing feat of all time Nike’s man Michael Jordan, Air Sponsorship himself, accepts the gold medal for basketball and covers up the Reebok logo on his kit. 1994 Winter Olympics in Lillehammer, Norway: In response to official-sponsor Visa’s claims that American Express is not accepted at the Olympic Village, AmEx creates an ad campaign claiming (correctly) that Americans do not need “visas” to travel to Norway. The 1994 Visa-AmEx affair was a continuation of a scrap featuring the exact same campaigns from the 1992 Winter Olympics. 1998 World Cup, France: Nike again. 2000 Sydney Olympics: Qantas Airlines’ slogan "The Spirit of Australia" sounds strikingly similar to the games’ slogan "Share the Spirit." Qantas claims it’s just a coincidence to the sound of official-sponsor Ansett Air helplessly banging its fists on the conference room table. 2002 Boston Marathon: Nike strikes again. As adidas-sponsored runners come off the course they are treated to spray-painted ‘swooshes’ honoring the day of the race, but not the race itself. And where does the law stand in such cases of ambush marketing? Usually somewhere out of view. Unlike piracy or counterfeiting, ambush marketing cases are rarely actionable, especially if the ambushers know what they are doing. In 1992 the granddaddy of boy bands New Kids on the Block sought legal action against newspaper USA Today, when it set up a charge-per-call service asking readers to tell them what they thought of the New Kids. The New Kids’ suit (like their careers), ended unfavorably. For those finding themselves on the working end of an ambush marketing campaign, the real question is one of ethics. Is ambush marketing an ethical business practice? The ambush marketing cases that get the most press are those involving heavyweight brands with massive resources, such as Nike, adidas and Reebok or Coca-Cola and Pepsi. Between such large and equal players, ambush marketing is deemed a last ditch technique to use when no other forms of competition are available – the corporate sponsorship answer to Mutually Assured Destruction.   However, for some, ambush marketing is the only way to compete. To become the official sponsor of the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, Anheuser-Busch paid more than US$ 50 million. In accordance with its agreement, it got all rights to use the word "Olympic" and the five-rings logo. Schirf Brewery, a local (and very small) company, came up with the rather ingenious (and apparently legal) idea of marking its delivery trucks with "Wasutch Beers. The Unofficial Beer. 2002 Winter Games." In accordance with copyright rules, Schirf had avoided using either the word 'Olympics' or the five-ringed logo. However, it had without a doubt connected itself to the games. One might be more inclined to sympathize with the woes of a local microbrewery over, say, adidas. In other words, does Goliath have an unfair competition claim against David?Is ambush marketing simply a natural evolution in a game where the stakes are so high that quaint ideas like Kant's categorical imperative and the Golden Rule are perversely unrealistic? It would appear so. Probably the most outright and unapologetic (not to mention successful) brand to embrace ambush marketing is Nike. If you are a major footwear producer, Nike has ambushed you: Converse in Los Angeles in 1984; Reebok in Atlanta in 1996; adidas on just about every continent in every two or four year competition. Strategically avoiding sponsoring events and thus exposing itself to its own tactics, Nike instead sponsors teams or individuals. In the upcoming 2002 World Cup, sponsored by adidas, many of the top teams such as Brazil are outfitted entirely in Nike gear. In this, adidas has no recourse. Nike also sponsored the US hockey team at the 2002 Winter Olympics and got plenty of exposure despite not paying the Olympic Organizing Committee a penny. In addition to such focused sponsorship, Nike is spending US$ 18 million on its 2002 World Cup ambush by funding bus-side screens to display the latest scores and hosting a mysterious "Scorpion" tournament featuring some of the world's best footballers. Nike’s ambush of the 1996 Atlanta Olympics is still seen as the ambush of all ambushes. Saving the US$ 50 million that an official sponsorship would have cost, Nike plastered the city in billboards, handed out swoosh banners to wave at the competitions and erected an enormous Nike center overlooking the stadium. The tactics devastated the International Olympic Committee’s credibility and spooked other organizations such as FIFA into adopting more assertive anti-ambushing strategies. The result of all of Nike’s ambushing appears to pay off though. Following the 1996 Atlanta debacle, many thought Nike had been an official sponsor of the games. More recently, a December 2001 study found that, from a list of 45 likely sponsors of the 2002 World Cup, 20 percent of those polled picked Nike. Rick Burton, executive director of Warsaw Sports Marketing Center at the University of Oregon, points out the obvious, "Nike has done nothing illegal." Simon Pestridge, Nike’s brand manager, explains more diplomatically in an interview with MSNBC in February of this year: "Nike likes to come at things from a different angle." Industry agreement is that, while getting ambushed is as inevitable as taxes and that other thing, there are steps a brand can take to minimize the damage. Merrill Squires, managing partner of the Dallas-based Marketing Arm, said in a 1999 interview with ABCnews.com, "The weak link is marketers who sign a sponsorship deal and don’t look at it carefully. They need to negotiate for every potential right to block out competitors." This blocking out is an option the Olympics offers sponsors, giving them first crack at all available commercial time or billboard spaces in their industries. Unfortunately, marketers don’t always take advantage of such offers, considering them potentially too costly. Obviously, as ambush marketing becomes more and more widespread – and acceptable – the biggest losers will be the events themselves. Organizations such as the Olympic Organizing Committee and FIFA rely on the revenue from corporate sponsorship for survival. As brand marketers increasingly view "official" sponsorship as equivalent to flushing wads of cash down a bottomless toilet, organizers will become more and more strapped for the means with which to host the events. With more questions and accusations than answers, the bottom line is that ambushing is probably just the next step on the marketing evolutionary ladder. Never a gentle industry to begin with and with consumers becoming increasingly conscious about being the end of the means, brands that spend their time sniveling about "fairness" will most likely have little audience for their whimpers. Adidas America spokesperson Travis Gonzolez sums up the ambush marketing debate, "If everyone throws up their logos, it’s all-out war." Nike’s Pestridge, ever the diplomat: "We play inside the rules and we bring a different point of view that’s true and authentic to sport." "Sport," George Orwell once said, bridging both, "is just war minus the shooting."             Abram D. Sauer is a writer currently living in New York. He was a columnist for The China Daily while living in Beijing and is co-founder of Chopstickfactory.com .