Cannes Titanium-Winning Work Is Experience-Based Goodness

Most traditional advertisement tactics rely on passive engagement. Experience-based advertisement is the opposite; it requires active engagement to work. The term “experiential marketing” shouldn't just connote event-let or stunt-based interpretations because the root term of “experience” in “experiential” is the key to unlocking the future of traditional advertising.

In short-hand, it's the experience that matters and not the term to describe it. Want proof? Take a look at the list of winners at this year’s Cannes Lions Titanium Grand Prix. That’s the category that practically every agency and brand loves to win because it highlights work that transcends traditional categories and is so innovative that it doesn’t fit in easily-defined advertising tactics. The Titanium Grand Prix, in shorthand, points to where advertising is heading.

FILMS THAT ARE EXPERIENCES

The first two winners are film-based. Evocative, inspiring, thrilling and deeply socially-conscious, the two films called “Womb Stories ” and “You Love Me ” take craft and storytelling to new levels of brand-led content. Tackling taboos and hypocrisy, respectively, these films are so good that they demand that the viewer stop watching passively. They almost beg us to lean in closer to the screen, to capture our breath and to start thinking differently. Yes, they are adverts. No they don't make us want to buy something. They make us want to think differently, view the world through a new lens and become empathetic AF.

RETHINKING APPAREL

Then comes the “real world” work. Jeans and apparel brand Diesel won big with a campaign called “Enjoy Before Returning ” that sought to flip the script on clothing returns policies in its industry by actually encouraging people to wear their clothes and then return them for a full refund. The campaign included Fashion Week parties in London, New York and London in which attached apparel tags were required for entry, regardless of brand. The initiative increased sales 24 percent while counterintuitively reducing online returns by 14 percent. And it made showing the attached Diesel clothing tag into a cool badging mechanism and not something to tuck away. In essence, the company’s return policy became the campaign itself and celebrates what the competition tries to avoid.

FOOTIE FOR THE WIN

Two football (soccer for the non-global folks) campaigns showed the way of how gaming, content and media come together for unique experience-based advertising. In a stroke of strategic brilliance, Burger King decided to spend budget on sponsoring the worst team in the English fourth-tier soccer league. For those uninitiated into the Football Association (FA), that’s the bottom of the bottom, right before getting into the amateur leagues.

Why would Burger King want to do that? Because Stevenage is a team listed in EA’s massively popular FIFA 2020 video game, a gaming property so thorough that it includes the sponsors on team jerseys in the game. The brand then prompted game players to use career mode to recruit the best players in the world like Christiano Ronaldo, Lionel Messi and Paul Pogba to play for Stevenage in the game, resulting in their logo adorning the most expensive players in the world to sponsor. You can only guess how many screengrabs of these players populated gaming boards and social media for the “Stevenage Challenge ,” giving Burger King media and influencer reach way beyond the value of a small team sponsorship. This campaign also won the Grand Prix for Brand Experience and Activation.

The second football-based Titanium went to Corona who created something called “The Match of Ages ” which demonstrated unseen-before mastery of video editing to create an entire 90-minute match from past footage of great games between rivals Guadalajara and Americas. The work required 20 editors working nonstop for 45 days to give fans in Mexico something to cheer about when COVID shut down the national sport. The goal was to raise funds for COVID-relief and to do so ads were sold inside the actual game by digitally inserting brands into the pitch-side hoardings. The game was aired in primetime and streamed live on the biggest network in Mexico. Corona saw a whopping 56 percent rise in sales during the week of the game and was the #1 trending topic on social media. Interestingly, the technology developed for this game can now be used by ABInBev for other sports in markets around the world.

EXPERIENCE THE GOOD

Another ABInBev beer brand showed the world how doing good is good innovation. Most companies say that they really want to combat global warming or be more sustainable but find themselves confronting issues so large that they are left in paralyzing efforts of incremental change or systematic inertia. Realizing farmers who sell their grain to the beer giant need financial incentives to change their ways, Michelob Ultra Gold offered to pay top dollar to US farmers willing to make the leap into growing organic barley: the brand guaranteed to be each farmer’s first customer three years from now, when the organic crops currently being adopted are ready for harvest. It also provides technical support and transitional premiums for the years in between to make it easier and economically viable for farmers to make the switch. With only about 1 percent of all American farmland growing organic, the “Contract for Change ” is the kind of big-thinking that purpose campaigns need to adopt. Action over words, people. And money to back it up.

RE-PURPOSED PURPOSE

Purpose played a central role in the last (but not nearly the least) campaign from the City of Chicago. (Yes, a city. And yes, Chicago.) Called “Boards of Change ,” the campaign took the plywood boards that barricaded storefronts during the Black Lives Matter protests proclaiming messages of unity and justice and turned them into voting registration booths. Talk about re-usability – something that is sorely lacking in brand activations…but we digress. What better way to make sure that voting mattered and that silenced voices are heard than to use instruments of protest into structures to register and vote? There is nothing innovative in plywood and spray paint, but the revolution occurs in how they are repurposed for impact. Chicago registered more voters than in any time in its history and more people came out to vote than any other election. And now these boards are on permanent display at the DuSable Museum of African American History.

All this Titanium-winning work points the way for activations to which we should all aspire: vibrant, emotional storytelling; ambitious and brave story-doing; and purpose-led good-for-the-world story-being. I can’t wait for next year’s entrants. Will it be yours?