Gearing up to participate in the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity 2024, advertising agencies around the world are in the process of sifting through their best work for the year. Considered the highest honour in the industry, the festival in which the agencies compete in 30 categories will take place between June 17 and June 21 this year.
Leo Burnett India, which brought home one gold, six silvers and four bronze Lions in the festival last year, has shortlisted three entries for this year. All of them have made ground-breaking use of technology to further the featured brands in very unconventional ways. The three campaigns are Gatorade Turf Finder, Oreo’s #SayItWithOreo and IKEA’s ads that save time.
Gatorade Turf Finder
This campaign had a much bigger intent than just brand promotion. It focused on an issue that is very relevant in urban India - the lack of space for sporting activities. The solution to this massive problem came about with the use of Google maps and their historic data tool to find open spaces and invite people to play in them.
Featuring several street interviews of people in Mumbai, the ad first establishes the disappearance of open spaces from the metropolis as its population density kept increasing over the years. It then goes on to explain how Gatorade, in partnership with Google maps, could help look for the spaces that can be temporarily converted into turfs. This would enable them to turn underused roads and lanes into playgrounds. The compiled data was also uploaded to their website www.gatoturffinder.com allowing players to find a turf and pre-book them.
Say it with Oreo
The campaign was all about enabling conversations. With actor-director Farhan Akhtar as their ambassador, it involved artificial intelligence generated answers to questions prompted by the users. The responses in Akhtar’s voice were humorous takes that could help one diffuse the tension in any given situation.
The ad explains how the beloved cookie had an embossed QR code which could be scanned before the user could ask questions about handling any tricky situation. The completely automated campaign was based on inputs from several of Akhtar's movies to generate the likeness of his voice.
Incidentally, in the 2023 Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, Leo Burnett Mumbai had won two silver Lions for their #BringBack2011 campaign.
IKEA’s ads that save time
Tying in the concept that IKEA products enable people to save time through organising spaces better, the agency also made ads that saved time of consumers by relaying their message within a few seconds.
The ad starts with listing down the amount of time wasted by an average person looking for things like keys, socks and remote controls. It then says that IKEA products can help a person save 5000 hours of looking for misplaced things. It then says how even their ads are so efficient that they help save several seconds of a user's life.
This is demonstrated through examples like a mother finding a toy within seconds to calm a crying child, a man taking mere seconds to locate a spatula which enables him to keep water from boiling over from a pot even as his eyes are stuck to his phone and a person (probably with eyes closed to prevent soap/shampoo from getting in their eyes) quickly grabs a towel off of a shelf. The idea here was to show how YouTube viewers could see and understand the entire ad before they were even able to press the skip button, marrying it with the message that the organising tools of IKEA could help them perform tasks in the interim that required less time to complete than pressing the skip button on a YouTube ads.
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