Welcome to day three of your daily debrief from this year’s (virtual) Cannes Lions. 
Here I’m sharing a quick round-up of the best content and campaigns that wowed from the Cannes International Festival of Creativity.
Rachel “Rom” O’Malley, senior creative.
Most valuable news, Folha De S.Paulo Newspaper
Folha de SP, a São Paulo newspaper, confronted fake news by showing the value of its journalism.
To protest fake news and misinformation it created a special edition printed with the same criteria used in printing money.
The edition was printed following all the official money printing criteria – security paper, watermark with light and dark tones, elements visible to ultra-violet light, fluorescent fibres, exclusive holographs, micro lettering, microprints, micro-perforated numbering and tactile printing.
As well as bringing Fake News in to the spotlight, the initiative also highlighted the value of professional journalism, and set true news as the most valuable currency in the world.
This campaign is so beautifully simple the most surprising thing about it is that someone didn’t come up with it sooner.
Future Official Sponsors, Entertainment Lions for Support
We heard on Monday from Frito-Lay CMO, Rachel Ferdinando that iconic brands act iconic, and this idea embodies that sentiment.
Budweiser introduced The Future Official Sponsors of the NWSL (National Women’s Soccer League).
They made placeholder products for nine of the biggest sponsorship categories in sport. And then they put them in an online marketplace where people pledged to purchase these products if they sponsored the league.
Ultimately, six major new brands joined Budweiser in sponsoring the NWSL including P&G, Verizon, CBS, Google and Twitch.
Love the grassroots nature of this idea – engaging buying power to inspire companies to act.
We are always bringing forth dating app ideas – but this idea came from the dating app itself.
Built on the insight that dating apps have become passive and mindless, Tinder set out to get users attention. Enter Swipe Night.
On Sunday nights they created an experience where swiping right, or not, revealed your true personhood.
Save the puppy or save a person? Every swipe moved you through a journey (think choose your own adventure) and your choices ultimately were to pair you with more compatible people.
Love how this idea hacks their very own platform to create more entertaining and meaningful engagement.
Apple, The Whole-Working-From-Home-Thing, Film Craft
In talking about Covid award-worthy work, here’s another from Apple.
What I love is how they seamlessly featured the importance of their platforms in how we worked this past year in an authentic and entertaining way.
There are two things that make it even more fun – 1. It is a continuation of the Apple Round Pizza Box ad from 2019 and 2. It won for film craft, and yet is so practical in its execution, very different than entries that typically win in this category.
Lebanese Army Peace Camo, Craft
Peace Camo reimagined traditional army camouflage, turning it from an icon of war to a symbol for peace.
The Lebanese Army needed to send a message that was more positive and as the original pattern is designed to protect soldiers on the battlefield, not in civilian situations, the army took the bold move to redesign the pattern and make it more human.
The level of detail in the craft made it stand out. The entrant could’ve just chosen random shapes that denoted acts of kindness, but instead, they want to the trouble of choosing images the army had been involved in.
A standard and old pattern was evolved and contains a message that changes perceptions.
The judges loved it because it challenged the norms of everyday objects and used creativity to change the potential for behaviour.
Sinyi Realty, In Love We Trust
Realty company knew people tend to buy houses when married, but marriage in Korea was down. So they created a film about the beauty of marriage to get more people thinking about and talking about marriage. Sinyi had the courage to play the looooong game.
Drawn Closer, Cox Communications
When COVID-19 cancelled their school play, Cox partnered with Thurman White Middle School and Academy Award winning director Patrick Osborne to reimagine the play as an animated short, voiced and performed by the students.
The result was Drawn Closer, a heartfelt story of a school play in trouble, and a drama class determined to save it (basically Nativity but real).
Students were fully hands-on throughout the process, stepping into a virtual booth to record their lines, and being directed by director Patrick Osborne over Zoom.
Facial capture technology was used to record each of the students’ performances and expressions to make their characters in the animated film as true to life as possible.
To top off the experience, the animated short debuted in a Hollywood-inspired virtual premier party where students walked the virtual red carpet and celebrated with their fellow students and families.
The judges loved how the campaign demonstrated the power of technology when it comes to bringing people together, and enabling human connection when we can’t see each other in person.
#DecoloniseAutocorrect, Distell, Grey South Africa
This campaign was born from the overwhelming frustration of having ‘colonised’ smartphones autocorrect Afrikaans words.
A creative at Grey in South Africa noticed that words saved in address books were not autocorrected in messages, and so they created a simple file that could be downloaded to phones which caused the phone to recognise words as contacts and stop autocorrecting them.
So simple, so easy to explain, and inspired by something any one of us could’ve accidentally discovered. Genius.
Lastly, Dove, Courage is Beautiful which we called out in the Day 1 recap, today, won the Grand Prix for Industry Craft.
See you tomorrow for the final day’s round-up!
