Funny! Winning Cannes ad uses real shoplifters
Turns out security cameras and brazen shoplifters gave birth to the top award film honored Saturday at the 63rd Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity.
Widely considered as the Academy Awards of the marketing and advertising world, Cannes Lions celebrates great ideas in the communications industry. The annual awards show and week-long trade event gathered more than 13,500 delegates from 90 countries this year in the south of France.
British department store Harvey Nichols’ video that stars real shoplifters to promote its loyalty app beat the other 2,800 entries in the film category and won the Grand Prix award. It is “just a perfectly executed film,” said Joe Alexander, jury president of the Film category and chief operating officer at The Martin Agency.
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“The music, the animation, the edit, the copy – flawless,” he said in an email. “And it’s the kind of film that works just as well in paid media as unpaid, a quality the best films today must have.”
The film by adam&eveDDB starts with real security camera footage of shoplifters pinching clothes, jewelry and perfume from Harvey Nichols’ flagship store in Knightsbridge, London. Following with footage of them being chased and caught, the video ends with the tagline “Love freebies? Get them legally” to promote the retailer’s Rewards App.
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To protect “the guilty,” as the video says in the beginning, faces of the shoplifters -- male and female, with various shades of skin tone -- are obscured with emoji-like animations of robber looks. While one man gets the special treatment of a grey hood with slits for the eyes and mouth, most faces are only covered with a black mask around the eyes to show more facial expressions – the eye rolls, fake smiles, mischievous giggles revealing two front teeth, etc.
Looking back at the award-winning campaigns announced earlier in the week, gender equality remains high on the agenda, Alexander said. The Film jury screened “a ton of entries in and around gender,” and the theme is also evident among winners in other categories.
After last year’s girl power trend, several winners this year focused on breaking down the social boundaries on what men can or should do.
► Shiseido’s “High School Girl?” film by Watts of Tokyo starts with a group of students wearing their grey uniform dresses in a classroom. Closer up, the video shows their shaded eyebrows, dark eyeliners and luminous lip gloss. You might not notice a single boy in the room, but they are all boys – just wearing wigs, dresses and makeup. The camera shifts to a pile of cosmetic products lying on a piece of paper with a note: Everyone can be pretty.
► The Dads #ShareTheLoad campaign by BBDO India for Procter & Gamble’s laundry detergent Ariel Matic encourages people to rethink gender equality at home. Following a viral video of an Indian father starting to help the mother do laundry, P&G partnered with India’s cultural calendar assigning laundry to her on even days and him on odd days. About 2.1 million men in India pledged to #ShareTheLoad, the campaign said.
► Pantene’s #DadDo campaign by Grey New York encourages fathers to spend time doing their daughters’ hair. Besides featuring National Football League dads and daughters on TV and online to show more dads how to dress hair, Pantene hosted live classes and developed style kits for the father-daughter activity. The brand’s slogan is “Strong is Beautiful” and the #DadDo campaign starts from the beginning: girls who spend quality time with their dad grow up to be stronger women, according to the North American Journal of Psychology.
