A couple of weeks back, 12,000 marketing, advertising and media people descended on the little seaside town of Cannes on France’s south coast.
Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity happens in the third week of June and has done so for the past 76 years. The festival celebrates the most creative advertising and marketing of the year past, amid the 30-degree heat and endless rosé.
As usual, I stumbled around jetlagged, sunstroked, and overstimulated in between giving talks about advertising effectiveness on behalf of Tracksuit (the higher your brand awareness, the better your conversion rates on TikTok; more on that in a few weeks) and listening to Elon Musk deliver a mumbly mea culpa to all the advertisers he’s driven off the X platform.
Despite ridiculous myths about tech companies not wasting money on advertising (Amazon is the world’s biggest advertiser and has spent over $20B on advertising the past two years running, and while Google, Facebook, Netflix, TikTok and WeChat account for 7% of total global ad spend), a host of tech players took home awards for their advertising.
Here are my top five from the show.
5. Facebook – Yes, Couch!
The world temporarily paused when The Bear’s Jeremy Allen White low-key parkoured in his undies for Calvin Klein, ending up resting his ripped unit on a red couch implausibly left on a Manhattan rooftop. Facebook found the couch, put it on Marketplace, and PR’d the hell out of it.
4. Amazon – Vanishing Emails
AWS figured out a way to automate the deletion of promotional emails from your inbox once the promotional period passed. Why? Apparently keeping those emails in inboxes causes 6,500 tonnes of CO2 each year. Have less annoying things in your life; save the planet.
3. Spotify – Spreadbeats
This one’s hard to explain, but it’s worth the watch. Spotify created the most ridiculous Excel spreadsheet ever to engage media planners (who plan their media in Excel) with Spotify. It’s bananas!
2. Doordash – Doordash-All-The-Ads
For their Superbowl campaign, Doordash created a stupidly long promo code that’d get you every product advertised on the Superbowl delivered free by Doordash. If you watched every ad, and put the promo code together, you won everything.
1. Notco – Mayo Haters
Is a plant-based food company a tech company? Well, The Not Company created an algorithm that learned how to combine an infinite combination of plants to replicate the flavour and texture of animal products – so yeah. And their mayonnaise was so good it made mayo-haters throw up a little in their mouths.
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