Cannes: US PR Agencies top 2022 Gold PR Lions Winners
A profoundly unexciting year for the public relations Lions—both in terms of the complete absence of public relations agencies in the Gold categories and the quality of the creative ideas—underscored two of the largest problems I have with the Cannes Lions and their treatment of PR: first, the focus on stunt-driven work to the exclusion of almost everything that makes PR special; and second, the focus on metrics that the profession more or less universally rejected more than 20 years ago.
There were only seven Gold-winning campaigns this year, and six of them were essentially stunts. And here’s the thing about stunts: they generate buzz, they spark conversations, they achieve plenty of media coverage—but they don’t typically have a significant impact on the relationship between an organization and its publics. If you believe the greatest value of PR is in building mutually-beneficial relationship-building (and leveraging those relationships), stunts don’t often accomplish very much.
Of course, that’s not universally true. It’s certainly possible for a well-crafted stunt to fundamentally change or strengthen relationships. Which is why the complaint about crappy metrics is so important: what most of these campaigns measure is either campaign reach or advertising equivalency (and honestly, any jury of more than two PR professionals should include at least one who refused to recognize any campaign that uses AVE or similar). So we are left with no idea of whether most of these Gold winners actually worked.
Beyond that, there are several other issues that stand out looking at this year’s crop of winners.
First, all of the winners hail from either continental Europe (five of the seven) or North America (the other two). I’m not arguing for tokenism, but our own experience suggests that there is plenty of top quality creative work in Asia-Pacific (our own Global Best in Show award last year went to an Asian campaign) and in developing markets in Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America. It sends a dispiriting message that the judges could not find anything from these markets worthy of recognition.
Second, the emphasis on non-profit work (two of the winners), purpose-driven campaigns (depending on one’s definition, four of the winners), continued, accompanied by a fondness for public sector work (two campaigns). As an industry that needs to demonstrate its commercial impact, the hostility—or at least indifference—toward purely commercial work is disappointing.
And third, while the exclusion of PR agencies from these Lions—particularly as “lead creative agency” but also this year in supporting roles—should trouble us as a business, the fact that this year’s best Gold campaign was conveived, executed and entered by a corporate communications department is encouraging.
Anyway, this year’s Gold winners, ranked:
7. The Lost Class
In the absence of any evidence to the contrary in the entry materials, I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest that this Leo Burnett campaign—addressing the critically important issue of gun violence in America—didn’t change a single mind. An issue on which public opinion is both highly polarized and for the most part set in stone is not going to be much influenced by a clever stunt that seems designed to make people on one side of the issue feel smug.
If anyone deserves to be deceived, it’s members of the gun lobby, but I have to question whether tricking a couple of them into attending a high school graduation—thinking it’s a real graduation, when in reality it commemorates the 3,044 students who would have graduated had they not been killed by gun violence—has any real benefit. The fact that the event was covered most prominently by Buzzfeed and Rachel Maddow only confirms the idea that it was preaching entirely to the choir.
Yes, it garnered media coverage (helpfully measured in ad equivalency) and secured 40,000 signatures on a petition (is that a lot?) but while allies seem to have enjoyed its cleverness, I can’t believe opponents were persuaded.
6. Vienna Strips on OnlyFans
One of the reasons that so many public relations campaigns have lousy metrics is that they begin with dumb objectives. Or, when there are actually smart objectives, the campaigns fail to measure anything related to those objectives.
Vienna Strips On OnlyFans hits both of these pet peeves head on. First, the dumb objective: “A simple strategy rooted in earned to raise awareness about the ever-growing power of algorithms.” Is there any concept emptier than “raising awareness” (even if the campaign actually measures awareness, which this one doesn’t). And second, the smart objective: “Our brief was to advertise Vienna’s cultural heritage in this very climate and help the city become a favorite among post-Covid travelling.” Again, nothing in the results section hints at whether this actually meaningful objective was achieved.
Still, the first of two winning campaigns from Jung von Matt has a smart idea, protesting the ridiculous censorship of Viennese art by the algorithms of mainstream social media sites such as Facebook and Instagram, which apparently cannot differentiate between art and pornography, by showcasing these national treasures on OnlyFans. So it scores some points for humor.
5. The BVG Hempticket – Come Home, Calm Down
There’s a veneer of purpose here—the idea that the campaign might reduce the use of personal vehicles over the holiday period—but I’m assuming that what really caught the eye of the judges is the humor of the approach, which really stood out in a sea of seriousness.
The campaign, created by Jung von Matt of Hamburg for the Berliner Verkehrsbetriebe (Berlin’s main transportation system), offered an innovative edible ticket for travel throughout Germany’s most bohemian city. The ticket derived from hemp, designed to be eaten after its final use of the day, and the campaign sought to capitalize on the legalization of cannabis in Germany, address the rage associated with both the holidays and public transportation in general, and also aimed to reduce traffic.
According to the results section of the entry, it achieved the latter objective—though precise numbers are not provided. It also generated social media “buzz” (pun very definitely intended, by the authors of the entry, not this reporter) again not quantified. The only hard numbers provided pertain to reach and (in what will become a theme this year) advertising equivalency.
4. The Breakaway: The First E-cycling Team For Prisoners
The one thing I’ll say for this year’s Grand Prix winner is that it fits the template for a Cannes Lions winning campaign to a tee. Indeed, it might have been created with Cannes in mind (though I’m sure nobody would be so cynical as to design a client campaign just to win an award).
The conceit is purposeful and clever. At-home exercise equipment company Decathlon partnered with BBDO Belgium (and Walkie Talkie for PR) to create “the very first eCycling team for prisoners” at Belgium’s Oodenaard maximum security prison. First, journalists were able to interview prisoners while they exercised on the Zwift virtual cycling platform. Then the prisoners challenged a team of lawyers, judges and even the Minister of Justice to a televised “race.”
After which, the Minister of Justice decided to expand the use of the Zwift system to multiple prisons across the country—an actual business outcome which makes up for the entry’s reliance on tired metrics like reach and even ad equivalency.
3. GenderSwap
I suppose it would be possible to level the same charges against GenderSwap that I leveled above against The Lost Class, which is to say that GenderSwap employed guerrilla tactics that easily could have alienated huge swathes of the gaming population—the segment already predisposed to treat women gamers with contempt and celebrate the casual misogyny of an industry still dominated by male developers.
The campaign, conceived and executed by BETC Paris, involved working with Women In Games to hack the game files of dozens of video games, swapping the animations of male and female characters so that male characters were animated to engage in certain behaviors—”ass shaking, sensual dances, suggestive posture”—the game designers had assigned exclusively to female characters. The modified avatars were played live on Twitch by some of the leading gamers in France, who explained the motivation behind the campaign, and went viral immediately.
What set this campaign apart is that it generated real benefits for Women In Gaming: the group’s Discord channel attracted 74% new female members, and more important, multiplied visits to its “job offers” page by more than 35 times. And the group was able to enter into new partnerships with gaming companies Ubisoft, Bethesda and Focus Home Interactive. What looked like a high-risk strategy turned out to be high reward.
2. #Flutwein – Our Worst Vintage
Ploughing through this year’s Gold PR Lions winners—and it did seem like a slog, even though there are only seven of them—I was almost as excited by the absence of ad equivalency in the results section of the #Flutwein entry as I was by the fact that it included real, tangible business results.
Creatively, I’m not sure this was the most exciting of this year’s Gold winners: the Ahr Valley wine region of Germany had been hit by catastrophic flooding in the summer of 2021, destroying facilities, wine cellars and the year’s vintage. The campaign by Seven.One Adfactory involved selling the 200,000 bottles of wine—soiled with mud and dirt—that had survived the disaster. The “Flood Wine” was labeled “authentically muddied” and sold on a crowd-funding platform.
As a result of the campaign, driven entirely by earned media, nearly 50,000 people bought the bottles that survived the flood. The value of the wine increased by 4,500% over the course of the campaign, and the crowd-funding site generated €4.4 million, making “Flood Wine” the most successful crowd-funding campaign in Germany.
1. 9/12 – The Untold Story Of Reconnecting New York
Two things made Verizon’s Untold Story campaign stand out from the other Gold winners in the PR category: the first is that it was developed and executed by the in-house communications department at the telecoms company, without any outside agency; the second—and by far the more important—is that this is a corporate reputation campaign that feels like an example of what makes public relations different from (and yes, more important than) the PR stunts that have dominated this category this year and throughout its history.
The campaign commemorated the 20th anniversary of the terror attacks on 9/11, focusing on a largely untold story: how Verizon (among many other companies, presumably) worked to rebuild the infrastructure of a devastated New York, starting the day after the attacks, despite the damage to its own downtown telecommunications hub. The campaign told the story of the company’s 14,000 employees. It was, primarily, an internal communications effort, using text messages to reach employees individually, with each message documenting a moment, action or story, delivered at the time of day the events actually happened 20 years ago.
Because this was an internal initiative there are no media metrics (and no ad equivalency), just overwhelming evidence that the campaign had a positive impact on one of the organization’s key stakeholder relationships. The event had a 99.86% engagement rate—I don’t believe I have ever seen anything like that—and received accolades from internal leadership. This is the power of public relations, and by far the most exciting thing I saw in this year’s PR category.
Source: PRVoke
