Velvet Friday 5: Our Cannes champions
Dove’s Courage is Beautiful campaign
Taking the well-deserved Grand Prix in the Print & Publishing Lions category, Dove’s Courage is Beautiful still serves as a powerful reminder of the fear and fatigue that swamped hospitals during the pandemic.
The brand scrapped Facetune and filters for raw portraits that captured the physical toll of the frontline. Emotional eyes and marks on the skin were bold statements for a beauty and personal care brand, and also echoed the sentiment of Banksy’s iconic NHS painting: not all superheroes wear capes.
Heineken’s Ad Shutter Campaign
Cheers to Heineken and its Shutter Ad Campaign.
10% of Heineken’s global advertising budget goes on outdoor media space. But why use a billboard, when you can use…erm…shutters?!
The beer giant redirected its budgets, paying 5,000 bar owners across the world, to advertise on their shutters which had been pulled closed at the beginning of the pandemic.
A new sustainable advertising platform that also supports independent businesses? We can raise a glass to that.
Cheers Heineken!
Not something we’d hope to see on a menu anytime soon, but Burger King still scooped the Gold Lion for print & publishing for its Moldy Whopper. It took the fast-food giant just 46 seconds to outwit its competitors with a slow-mo shot of a stale burger that uses a romantic blues soundtrack as juxtaposition.
More importantly, it got everyone talking. Not just about the ad, but why artificial preservatives are, in many ways, the food equivalent of non-biodegradable plastic. We’d love to have been flies on the wall at McDonald’s HQ when this one aired.
Epic Games’ ‘Astronomical’ Travis Scott Event
Fortnite has helped turn gaming from a hobby into a lifestyle. It’s spawned a new arm of influencers that share their screens on YouTube to be watched by millions.
With that in mind, it doesn’t boggle the mind to think that 12.3 million Fortnite players tuned in to watch Travis Scott’s virtual gig, part of his Astronomical World Tour. But to put that figure into context, it’s more views than Meghan and Harry’s tell-all with Oprah Winfrey in the UK.
Picking up the top prize in Digital Craft, Epic Game’s virtual alternative came at a time when the future of live music was hanging on by a thread, and arguably became the biggest triumph of the livestream pivots. While this won’t ever replace the euphoria of live music, it offered a much-needed escape and a light at the end of the tunnel to an industry that has been decimated.
Embarrassing Plastic Bags by East West Market
In a campaign devised by Rethink Vancouver for organic grocery store East West Market, the logos on single-use bags we wouldn’t look twice at were replaced with ones we’d tangle ourselves into awkward positions just to snap a discreet picture of. Think things like The Colon Care Co-Op and Into the Weird Adult Video Emporium.
But in a much smaller font, the bags link the embarrassment that comes with a single-use bag: ‘Avoid the shame. Bring a reusable bag’.
The campaign didn’t take the gold, which is unsurprising given the bags likely became very desirable with Vancouver’s hipster community. But we love the sentiment. This campaign goes to prove that brands don’t need to focus on environmental doom and gloom or be overly preachy. Sometimes humour is an easier way to start a conversation.