Medieval carnivals were essentially licensed periods of rule-breaking. The normal social order got turned upside down, hierarchies dissolved, and things that couldn’t be said or done the rest of the year were suddenly not only permitted but celebrated. Cannes has always felt a bit like that to me. Midweights carrying Lions lauded like kings; Holdco execs with inadvisable flip flops and rookie sunburn. And the best work in any year at Cannes is the work that understands the same principle: that the rules are there to be broken, that norms exist to be interrogated, and that the brands and agencies willing to be genuinely disruptive rather than merely cheeky are the ones worth watching.
Instacart – “Bananas”
The Super Bowl celebrity spot is a certain kind of beast – we all know how they’re supposed to work, and what they’re trying to do. Into this world walked Instacart with a lo-fi, barely-held-together piece of musical chaos starring Ben Stiller and Benson Boone, which treats traditional advertising narrative with something approaching contempt. It’s weird. It’s uncomfortable. It’s hilarious. It’s as if you got the Safdie Brothers to direct Eurovision 1986 and then watched the whole thing on mushrooms. It shouldn’t work at all, and the fact that it absolutely does is the point.
4Creative/Glue Society – “Fountain of Filth”
The norm being broken here isn’t an advertising norm, it’s a moral one. Water companies in Britain have been pumping raw sewage into our rivers and seas while paying their CEOs eye-watering bonuses, and more or less getting away with it. 4Creative and Glue Society responded by erecting a fountain on the Southbank – a dozen ordinary people vomiting sewage, with a fat-cat executive perched above them pocketing his millions. Over 100,000 people saw it in person. The fact that it’s also a brilliant piece of public art makes it all the more devastating. Hard to ignore the fury within the idea, and that’s what makes it brilliant.
Carlsberg/Liverpool FC – “Signs of Unity”
I’ll be upfront: this is Fold7’s work, so I’m necessarily biased. But the norm being challenged here is one that nobody in football had really bothered to confront before – that deaf supporters have always been excluded from one of the most visceral collective experiences in football – singing the club anthem. Through Carlsberg’s decades-long partnership with Liverpool, we had a chance to do something about it. Teaching the Kop to sign You’ll Never Walk Alone in British Sign Language, so that deaf fans could finally be part of that moment, is one of those ideas where the purpose and the creative are genuinely inseparable. The moment, and the legacy that extends from it, means that this is much more than a gesture.
Dave Billing is ECD/partner at Fold7.
