We give you a run down on some of our favourites and least favourites from this year over this issue and the next.
ET Bureau
It should come as no surprise to you dear reader that team BE has its own take on what the global advertising industry considers the best. Some entries have us enthusiastically joining the cheer squad. Others have us baffled, wondering how something so trite, cynical, bizarre or unoriginal got anywhere near striking distance of a trophy. We give you a run down on some of our favourites and least favourites from this year over this issue and the next. Best:
Direct: Volvo -The Greatest Interception Ever Agency: Grey New York
Outdoor: iPhone – World Gallery Agency: TBWA/Media Arts Lab, LA
We hear it was a neck and neck contest between Volvo and a pornographic website and no surprise, the naughty site lost hand’s down. Which seems to be the inevitable fate of such sites that make it to the awards: this is the second instance we hear of one losing out at the last stage to a more “legitimate” business. Perhaps these sites ought to wait their turn for the revival of the Hot D’Or, a festival of pornography that was also held at Cannes.
Having said that, Grey’s entry for Volvo is no undeserving victor. It’s probably one of the most definitive pieces of 21st century communication, a bewildering post-modernist take on advertising which is still desperately trying to do all the things more obvious forms of advertising try to do.
Volvo invited people to tweet with #volvocontest accompanied by the name of a person they loved, giving that person the chance to win a new Volvo SUV. The catch? They had to tweet this every time they saw a commercial for another car during the SuperBowl. It’s obvious from this win that Direct has come a long way from a mailer trying to shock, tempt or otherwise coerce you into investigating its contents. Until Cannes starts another category purely catering to ambush marketing, this is a well-deserved and an appropriate win, which also succeeds in expanding the definition of the category. Outdoor: iPhone – World Gallery Agency: TBWA/Media Arts Lab, LA Utter the word ‘crowdsourced’ and immediately you’d wish you hadn’t. Because we would have crowdsourced a hit on you by then.
In its heydays, the C word had become the go-to prop in the arsenal of marketers who, instead of exercising their creative muscle, outsourced the job to regular Joes with a lot of free time and inclination to spare. Some still call it cutting-edge and brave, we call it lazy. But every once in a long while a campaign comes along that redefines the very scope of this genre of marketing. And while they’re at it, re-instils our faith in adkind.
Apple’s outdoor campaign for the iPhone 6 is just what the doctor ordered. This global campaign put our generation’s penchant for documenting everything from the mundane to the spectacular to good use. iPhone users from all over the world sent in photographs that the agency ran on over 10500 sites worldwide, including 400+ large format billboards that ran across 73 cities in 25 countries. Pictures of stunning landscapes and sleeping babies, fields and mountains to urban transit.
They are the kind of pictures Instagram riches are made of. And best captured the iPhone’s superior capabilities. Sorry, Samsung, Lumia and the rest. But what got it a best in our books is the fact that this is not just advertising. It’s also art.
Those of us who are fans of rather obscure and/or abrasive forms of music have at some point of time or the other, usually in our teens and early twenties, tried a few horribly transparent ruses to evangelise our favourite bands. It’s with great disappointment that we realise soon (but never soon enough) that pretty girls are not interested in Steve Vai’s shred attack on The Animal. That Eaten Back To Life by Cannibal Corpse is not everyone’s idea of great party music. That there are people who find the 80 plus minutes of Tales from the Topographic Oceans by Yes boring and not an exhilarating musical adventure that demands to be heard back to back four times at a stretch.
Someone at Grey and/or music streaming service Soundcloud really likes power noise or dark ambient industrial or whatever the seven odd minutes of this entry are — we confess to being a little rusty when it comes to the exact genre.
And we are at a certain level almost furious with envy at them making just about everybody from populist Coldplay fans to classical music snobs to the “abhi toh party shuru hui hai” types to the Radio Lions jury at Cannes sit through seven minutes of their favourite genre: abrasive droning punctuated by guttural cries, shrieks, bullets and dogs barking. It’s apparently online streaming service Soundcloud’s sonic recreation of the Berlin wall with soundwaves creating pictures of the wall as it stood.
It’s all very grim and Teutonic but to our minds also incredibly self-indulgent and dull. Less advertising of any sort and more avant-garde art that gets celebrated at Cannes’ other famous festival, usually set to some horrifyingly perverse visuals courtesy Lars Von Trier. The kind of thing that makes nonsense of David Ogilvy’s most sensible piece of advice: Your role is to sell, don’t let anything distract you from the sole purpose of advertising.
Press: The Buenos Aires Public Bike System Agency: The Community/LA Comunidad Miami
At first sight this print campaign reeks of the kind of proactive advertising that gives awards a bad name and their organisers sleepless nights. At second sight… nah, still the same.
We’re all for flatter tummies and reducing our carbon footprint, but there’s got to be a better way to push people to cycle more and take advantage of the 24/7 public bike system. ‘Never Stop Riding’ the campaign tells accompanied by a series of illustrations. The analogies aren’t particularly solid — dog and tail, baby and boob, squirrel and nuts and moth to a flame (the moth dies by the way). How bad do the rest of the entries in this category have to be for a campaign like this to nab the Grand Prix? Perhaps the jury had a flat tyre on their way back to the judging room. And you know what they say, in the land of the blind, the man with the bicycle is king.
Now, we shall leave you, dear reader, with a promise. We hereby solemnly swear never to give Goafest a hard-time again. Ever.
ET Bureau
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