I visited the Cannes Advertising Festival exactly one year ago, and I still look at the world’s most extensive advertising festival with wide-open eyes and warm memories. If I cannot inspire myself by attending the festival, I can always look at the homepage of the festival, at least looking at those entries that received a Grand Prix or a Golden Lion prize.
Last year there was a whole series of powerful campaigns and projects at Cannes – ones that were better and better and better.This year the capacity is lesser, and that may be why I want to emphasise not the most popular or moving campaigns, but instead the ones that were most clever and smart.
Cadbury chocolate, for instance, is known for its hairy drummer and children whose eyebrows dance in relation to music. This year the company distinguished itself with an idea about where joy is born. That particularly applies to “famous” people who posted their joy on YouTube and gained nearly 50 million views.
Burger King, in turn, triumphed with its McWhopper campaign last year. This year it triumphed once again by challenging not its most direct competitor, but instead technologies that “break into” every viewer’s home.
The Faeroe Islands, for their part, also challenged Google with the “Google Sheep View” campaign, thus emphasising the fact that there are more sheep than people on the islands and that there are few streets, but lots of lovely natural landscapes without any roads.
My subjective selection also includes three beer campaigns with very different messages and goals.
Heineken’s idea is perhaps not the most genial one, but it does lead me to smile about morality – if you want “something better” that is simultaneously better for myself, sometimes I end up “shooting myself in the foot.”
The Tiger beer campaign offers a technologically wise and artistically elegant approach toward environmental pollution problems.
Tecate beer, in turn, supports real men who are powerful, courage and harsh, looking at the way in which they treat women. If they offend women, then they do not deserve Tecate beer. It may be paradoxical, but it is a beer company that is opposing violence against women, presenting beer as that which might lead the man to review his behaviour.
Verena may be an unknown brand. It is a Thai company that specialises in functional food and cosmetics. A Golden Lion prize was awarded at Cannes for an ad which shows that fats and oil can provide human faces.
When it comes to the Cannes festival, it would be a sin to ignore a brilliant campaign in which producers from Hollywood reject French films. Oh, what films those are – winners of prizes at the Cannes festival!
Another clever, pointed and reactive campaign related to movies was a campaign organised by the Netflix series “Narcos” on the topic of Spanish language lessons. Why not learn from Pablo Escobar himself?
I wish to conclude this selective selection with a powerful campaign about corrupt politicians. I would like to propose that the whole advertising industry in the world share ideas and outstanding social ideas that can be implemented in other countries, because corruption flourishes not in Brazil alone. We don’t have to look far and wide to find corruption. It’s enough to listen to conversations among oligarchs to lose any illusions about what is happening in our country.
