A tale of three Cannes GPs: McWhopper, Monty and JWT’s new Rembrandt

There are so many potential Grand Prix winners at the Cannes Lions these days that we won’t attempt to cover them all.

Tipsters (including our own Top Tippers) are so good at it that you know most of them by now anyway. This year’s much-tipped big winner at Cannes seems likely to be Burger King’s ‘McWhopper’ from Y&R New Zealand.

It’s a clever idea sure and hard to categorise, which means it can win lots of categories. So far it’s won Media and Print & Publishing GPs but it’s really PR isn’t it? Which it didn’t win. Neither did a PR company for that matter, Sweden’s Forsman and Bodenfors won for retailer COOP’s ‘Organic Effect.’

Another interesting winner was adam&eveDDB’s ‘Monty the Penguin’ which won the Creative Effectiveness GP. Some of you may think this is a bit old – not even the latest John Lewis Christmas special – and you’d be right. But at least it’s an ad.

The trick here is to justify your effectiveness case – as in the Effies or the IPA awards – and it seems that A&E founder and planning guru David Golding creamed it with a weighty econometric analysis of Monty. But 2014 is a long time ago..

Think this is the right one, there are so many parodies around it’s hard to find. Which says a lot about the campaign’s impact, of course.

Another goodie, strangely perhaps, was the winner of the-johnny-come-lately ‘Creative Data’ GP. Or should that be Martin? As we’ve noted, creative data is rather like creative accountancy – contradictory and possibly dangerous.

But JWT Amsterdam’s creation of a new Rembrandt for ING – it used lots of computing power hence the data element – is actually good because it’s a great idea brilliantly executed. None of our tipsters picked this as far as I can recall but we made it one of our best ads of the month, which should put those creative directors in their place.