Good week/Bad week: Cannes Lions

Now that we've put some time and distance between ourselves and la Croisette, we feel like we have attained the proper perspective to report objectively on what happened last week at Cannes. Here's our definitive assessment of the 70th International Festival of Creativity...in the form of good week / bad week.?

Good Week?/?

Artificial Intelligence: It was inescapable at Cannes (even during the jury press conferences, thanks to the one journalist who insisted on asking the same question about AI to every category president). Agencies and holding companies scrambled to show they were in front of the wave, by discussing or announcing their partnerships with leading AI companies. Publicis was keen to remind everyone it was into AI before it was cool, with smug?ads?about its Marcel platform. And platforms, like Google and Meta, revealed new AI tools developed with marketers in mind. The overriding sense is that everyone thinks AI is going to be important for the industry, but they’re not exactly sure how it will play out. One boss of a major US ad agency told the?Financial Times: ‘This is the first year in my career where I’m like, “I don’t know how this year ends”.’?

Cannes Lions:?The festival received 26,992 awards entries – a 6% increase on last year – and most of the major tech companies were present on the beach and in the Palais. Fears that the pandemic or the world's subsequent economic troubles could dampen the industry's enthusiasm for Cannes did not materialise. Also, no major climate protests disrupted the event, which the organisers will no doubt be relieved about.?

GUT: The five-year-old independent agency network won three?Grands Prix?(in the PR, Creative Data and Mobile categories) for three different campaigns. It was also named the festival’s Creative Agency of the Year, Independent Agency of the Year and Independent Network of the Year. Who could have foreseen that kind of barnstorming performance from a young Argentine shop? We’ll just say that we named GUT one of our?Pioneer?agencies in February and leave it at that.?

Apple: The tech company won three?Grands Prix?for three different campaigns and was named the festival’s Creative Brand of the Year for the first time in its history. More impressive, the brand was credited as the creator (or co-creator) of every one of its Grand Prix-winning campaigns. But Apple’s VP of marketing communications, Tor Myhren, was at the festival to reassure any agencies feeling like one of the most successful and creative companies in the world no longer has need of their services, saying on stage on Thursday that they ‘are forever’, as long as they understand their role as outsiders and challenge clients to see things from a new perspective.?

Any agency with links to a jury president: We understand that there are only a handful of advertising holding companies and only so many creative networks, but even still, there seemed to be a lot of recusing going on during the Grands Prix discussions.?

Geographical diversity: HungerStation’s Subconscious Order campaign, by Wunderman Thompson, Riyadh, became the first Saudi Arabian campaign to ever win a Grand Prix at Cannes. Armenia and Nigeria also picked up their first-ever Lions.?

Straw bags: The must-have accessory on la Croisette last week, according to Contagious editor and fashion maven, Chloe Markowicz.?

Big Brands: Something like half of the total Grands Prix were awarded to well-established, storied brands, like Nike, Apple, Adidas and Dove.?

Iceland: The supermarket, not the country. The British frozen-food retailer won a Gold Lion in the Creative Commerce category for its?Food Club?initiative, which offered interest-free microloans loans to hard-up customers. Is it snobbish that we were surprised? The campaign was also one of the few concessions to the cost-of-living crisis that we spotted at the festival last week.

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Bad Week?/??

Iceland: The country, not the supermarket. Didn't win a single Lion.?

Fast Food: Quick service restaurants tend to do well at Cannes, but not a single one collected a Grand Prix this year. As best as we can tell, this is the first time this has happened since 2003. Likely, it was just a bad year for the sector.?Delivery apps HungerStation and Pedidos Ya both won Grands Prix, so we can assume juries were not taking an ideological stand against unhealthy food.?

The Mammoth Meatball:?We thought the sheer scale of the press coverage earned by the?campaign?(created by Wunderman Thompson for Vow) all but guaranteed it the PR Grand Prix. But according to the PR jury President, Jo-ann Robertson, the meatball’s fatal flaw was that it was inedible, which the jurors felt contradicted its message of encouraging people to eat alternative meat.?Still, spare a thought for Wunderman Thompson communications and PR manager, Emilie Sharp, who had to chaperone the meatball around Cannes. ‘It had to stay somewhere secure for the evening (no 5am finishes at the Gutter Bar!), and as my room was near many of its appointments (it had a busier schedule of events than I did), I had the pleasure of being its roomie,’ she told us. ‘Luckily there was enough space for both of us so we didn’t quite have to share a bed.’?

The Creative Data Category: The Grand Prix-winner, The?Artois Probability, was fine work by GUT?Buenos Aires, but the category itself feels like a relic of a time when everyone was talking about 'big data' like it was an elixir. It might be time for Creative Data to go the way of the Cyber Lions.?

Social Media: Among the big winners at Cannes this year there were few examples of innovation within the main social media platforms. Twitter got a look-in, thanks to Prime Video's?Who – A Thread Movie?campaign, which won a Gold Lion in the Social & Influencer category. And YouTube and Twitch played a part in a few big winners. But Instagram, TikTok, Snap and Facebook hardly featured at all.?And then there was Dove, which won a Grand Prix for its?#TurnYourBack?campaign criticising TikTok’s Bold Glamour filter, and two Gold Lions for?Cost of Beauty, which told the story of a young woman who struggles with her mental health because of unattainable standards of beauty paraded on social media.??

The Metaverse: Nary a mention. The Titanium Grand Prix-winning First Digital Nation campaign for the government of Tuvalu was technically a metaverse campaign, but people seemed to want to play down that aspect of it as much as possible. ‘It’s not a technology idea, it’s a problem-solving idea,’?said?the Titanium jury president, David Droga. Blockchain technologies, including NFTs, got similarly short shrift.

Contagious Live London

?Get briefed on the biggest trends from the International Festival of Creativity at Contagious Live in London on 12 July.?

Between 6:30pm–7:45pm at Framestore’s Chancery Lane offices, We’ll deliver a sneak preview of two sections from our Cannes Deconstructed presentation, sharing insights into the campaigns that cleared up on the Croisette and what they say about the direction of the industry.?

We’ll also interview a couple of Cannes Lions jury members on stage and bring you up to speed with some of the best recent campaigns through our always-raucous (by the standards of industry events) Campaign Pitch Battle.??

Tickets are just ￡35 (which is less than the price of two drinks at the Gutter Bar in Cannes), and include pizza, beer and a chance to mingle with like-minded peers after we’re done yakking away on stage.?Contagious.

To read this week's Contagious Edit in full,?click here.

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