Going into Cannes there wasn’t a clear winner this year like there had been in previous year’s – think Like A Girl or Meet Graham. This created a level playing field for all of the campaigns, making the margins of reaching even just the shortlist smaller.
As a juror this year, one of my main observations was that it is increasingly apparent that the global creative community does not consist of different countries working in silos. It is much more of a hive working together – which we saw a lot of this year.
Today, most creative agencies would agree on the importance of being culturally relevant in our approach. We are becoming obsessed with big topics and current trends and are using creativity to bring our clients and brands in to conversations around topics and trends that already have huge levels of engagement.
For example, in Cannes we saw a number of campaigns addressing the state of our oceans. We saw the impactful image of the dead whale from Greenpeace, made entirely of plastic waste. We saw Value of Nature, where the great barrier reef foundation for the first time put a price tag on the reef, to compare its financial benefits with a planned coal mining project. Strawless Ocean #StopSucking from Lonely Whale Foundation was another one. And of course the PR Lions Grand Prix Winner, Trash Isles from Lad Bible, which looked at plastic pollution in the oceans from a perspective that everyone would recognise, the perspective of a country, making us feel the problems of the 'plastic island' as if we were the citizens.
And these were just a few of the campaigns addressing the pollution in our oceans. It is quite powerful to see what can happen when creatives from different places, with different insights and solutions, tackle the same globally and culturally relevant problems.