This year at Cannes, there was a 34% increase in entries to the Creative Effectiveness Lions. “The continued rise of entries in the Creative Effectiveness Lions indicates the importance of benchmarking the value of creativity in the boardroom, for clients and agencies,” the festival’s Managing Director Simon Cook told WARC. “Creative Effectiveness isn’t only focused on business growth, but how Lions-winning work can positively impact culture and define brand purpose in the long-term,” he continued.
This context makes picking up a Bronze Lion in the Long-term Creative Effectiveness category for our work with Audi, in partnership with BBH and PHD, an even bigger achievement. The winning work, ‘Beautiful Cars with Amazing Brains’ is focused on Audi’s brand journey over the last four to five years and the sales impact of advertising over this time.
It showcases the overarching creative strategy that drove the brand transformation to shift desirability and sales. Moving from a pure rational performance image to the emotive story Audi tells today, it covers everything from its iconic Clowns campaign to the R8 and RS3 ‘birth’ work. Advertising delivered just over £2bn incremental revenue between 2015 to Q1 2018; a return on marketing investment of £28 for every £1 spent.
Audi is a business that takes social media seriously. The fact that the medium been recognised as playing a fundamental role in delivering effectiveness in a through-the-line campaign is another step forward for our industry. If you’re interested in how this happened, you can read more about the role our work played here and the wider campaign here. We’re proud not only to have produced some amazing creative for ‘Beautiful Cars with Amazing Brains’, but that it’s had such a huge impact for Audi.
And our London office wasn’t the only Lion winner. Our team in Paris picked up an amazing seven shortlists and a Silver and Bronze Lion for #NoBuildChallenge within the Entertainment category. A brilliant campaign for WWF France that used Fortnite as inspiration to show that staying alive is difficult without the planet’s natural resources. Finally, our Milan team was shortlisted in Media for the impactful cyberbullying focused work for Ikea, ‘Sensitive Rooms’.
All in all, a great 2019 Cannes Lions for We Are Social and a year of work to be proud of. Congratulations to all our teams who were involved in the awarded campaigns – we look forward to making an even bigger impact next year.
