British Airways and Uncommon win outdoor Grand Prix at Cannes despite controversy
Uncommon Creative Studio’s first campaign for British Airways has won the outdoor Grand Prix at Cannes Lions. The campaign, which uses 512 executions to showcase our true motivations for travel, won over the judges in a hard-fought category that saw a 7% rise in entries this year.
“A British original” is not without controversy as a winner, given the size of BA’s carbon footprint. But jury president Javier Campopiano, worldwide CCO of WPP’s Grey, favoured “creative purity” over sustainability goals. Very generous of him given that relative newcomer Uncommon won the business from the mighty WPP back in October 2021.
adam&eveDDB’s much-tipped work for CALM, “The Last Photo,” won two Gold Lions in the Outdoor category.
New Zealand agencies won two Grand Prix on the first day at Cannes.
Special Group in Auckland won Health & Wellness for its very clever idents in which murdered characters from a TV drama spookily come back to life at the end of each episode to lament their lack of life insurance.
In Radio & Audio, Collenso BBDO took home the Grand Prix for a low-budget, high impact campaign for mobile brand Skinny. Radio ad voiceovers were outsourced to New Zealanders, who were invited to phone in voiceovers by reading out scripts written on billboards.
Publicis Groupe’s “Working with Cancer” campaign to help end the stigma of cancer in the workplace won the Grand Prix in Health for Good. The cross industry initiative succeeded in recruiting 600 businesses, impacted more than 20 million employees, and even engineered a Super Bowl slot.
