Chaired by David Lubars, who is chief creative officer of BBDO North America, the Titanium jury awarded but one Lion at the recently concluded Cannes International Advertising Festival.
Lubars reflected on the Titanium Lion recipient, Tokyo-based Design Barcode, which earned the honor for creating customized designs that judges credited with reinventing universal packaging barcodes.
“This year’s Titanium winner was not only fresh and unusual creative–it also invented a new media channel in which brands can communicate,” related Lubars. “Further, the agency owns the idea, so it creates a new financial model as well.
“The idea is simple and brilliant,” he continued. “They changed an ugly thing anyone on the planet old enough to buy something has seen: the depressing, Orwellian, sterile, clinical, bar code.
“Brands can now have fun, friendly, engaging bar codes for their companies that communicate cool things about the products. For example, a hair transplant place’s bar code looks like the top of a bald guy’s head and the comb over strands are actually the bar code.
This approach will delight people all over the world as they see fun, interesting bar codes. Our industry is often accused of polluting the culture with crap. Here’s a case of us blowing fresh air into it.”
FILLING A VOID? Last year the Titanium was defined as a competition to recognize integrated campaigns. However, the Design Barcode win reflected a clear change in that definition, which Lubars commends.
“This year, we returned the Titanium to its original purpose: to award something that is totally new, the first of its kind,” affirmed Lubars. “Because with the Titanium, it couldn’t just be brilliant, it also had to change the game. It’s an award for who does it first. We saw several brilliant things, but not a lot of brilliant and never-seen-it-before things. In fact, so few, we only short-listed three pieces.” (The other two short-listed entries were the Monopoly Live campaign out of Tribal DDB London, and Marc Ecko’s viral film Still Free from New York agency Droga5.)
At the same time, Lubars sees a void in Cannes when it comes to the earlier alluded to integrated fare. Regarding creative trends, he observed, “It seems like creating a brilliant campaign with ten different touch points is becoming the point of entry. Yet, today, Cannes doesn’t have a mechanism to recognize this great work. You have separate competitions for print, tv, poster, cyber, direct, et cetera. There’s no way to see how a big idea can be executed across all media. There should be. So I’m advocating adding a new category for ‘campaign’ to future Cannes shows.”
JUDGING Asked what he took away from the Cannes judging experience this year, Lubars responded, “I was struck by the quality of our judging group. Clearly, extraordinarily talented people like to judge this category: Trevor Beattie, Nicolas Brien, Warren Brown, Adriana Cury, Craig Davis, Tom Eslinger, Scott Goodson, Filip Nilsson, Chuck Porter.
“The other thing that struck me is how harsh we had to be when assessing this work [so that the Titanium would recognize only truly new, creatively breakthrough projects].”
In terms of the overall work at Cannes, Lubars related, “We’re grateful BBDO did so well. We’re particularly thrilled with the Grand Prix awarded to AMV [BBDO, London, for Guinness’ “noitulovE”]. But, if we’re honest with ourselves, we believe we need to add more Gold to our mix of colors. Many of our awards were Silver or Bronze. We need to add more Gold if we’re going to stake the claim of the world’s most compelling content.
“Regarding the work in general,” he concluded, “we are seeing more and more well integrated campaigns. Also, the simplest ideas prevail.”
