The Barbarian Group tops first Innovation Lions; DDB Manila leads Mobile; Ogilvy Amsterdam roars with marquee Media Lion
A first-year competition and a category in its second year highlighted day two of the awards ceremonies at Cannes. The former was the Innovation Lions which were created to reward technologies and breakthroughs in such areas as platforms, apps, tools, programs, products and hardware.
Taking the Grand Prix at the first Innovation Lions was The Barbarian Group on the basis of its open source platform for creative coding, named Cinder. A subsidiary of Cheil Worldwide, The Barbarian Group is a marketing agency that began using Cinder as an in-house tool in 2007, enabling users to program audio, video, graphics networking, image processing and computation geometry. Cinder was made free and available to the public when The Barbarian Group released the software to the open source community in 2010. The platform has since been used to produce independent and commercial work worldwide, including large-scale interactive installations, intricate data visualizations and mobile applications. Additionally Cinder has been used by MIT Media Lab, technology companies including Google and Microsoft, and has played a key role in large-scale creative work for such brands as Charity:Water, Nike and IBM.
Like the previous night’s Creative Effectiveness Lions but unlike most other Cannes categories, there are no Gold, Silver or Bronze Lions in the Innovation Lions structure. Instead there are just Innovation Lions and this inaugural year there were three recipients other than Cinder: A new type of phone dubbed “Two Screens Are Better Than One,” from YOTA Moscow, featuring a smartphone on one side and an e-reader on the other; a MasterCard Display Card combining a card with a screen for The Getin Noble Bank in Warsaw; and Thunderclap, a piece of social media technology from DE-DE, New York.
Mobile, Media
Just in its second year, the Mobile Lions this time around were topped by Grand Prix winner DM9 Jayme Syfu, Manila (a DDB agency), for its “TXTBKS” which condensed textbooks into text messages. These messages were then put onto SIM cards and repackaged into Smart TXTBKS on older phones, creating much needed textbooks in the Philippines, a market where tablets and e-readers are too expensive for most families.
The Mobile Lions jury awarded 59 Lions, including nine Gold in addition to the Grand Prix winner.
Meanwhile the Media Lions Grand Prix was bestowed upon a campaign for funeral insurance company Dela out of Ogilvy & Mather Amsterdam and media agency MediaValue. The creative tapped into a tried and true insight–that people often regret not properly expressing their love and caring for a departed friend or family member. So why not share those positive feelings with people while they are still alive? Per this initiative, people could express their thoughts and feelings on websites. From these stories emerged commercials, online videos and billboard postings. Dela also had these stories broadcast over a full night on a TV channel.
Google Opens Its Defense In Antitrust Case Alleging Monopoly Over Online Ad Technology
Google opened its defense against allegations that it holds an illegal monopoly on online advertising technology Friday with witness testimony saying the industry is vastly more complex and competitive than portrayed by the federal government.
"The industry has been exceptionally fluid over the last 18 years," said Scott Sheffer, a vice president for global partnerships at Google, the company's first witness at its antitrust trial in federal court in Alexandria.
The Justice Department and a coalition of states contend that Google built and maintained an illegal monopoly over the technology that facilitates the buying and selling of online ads seen by consumers.
Google counters that the government's case improperly focuses on a narrow type of online ads — essentially the rectangular ones that appear on the top and on the right-hand side of a webpage. In its opening statement, Google's lawyers said the Supreme Court has warned judges against taking action when dealing with rapidly emerging technology like what Sheffer described because of the risk of error or unintended consequences.
Google says defining the market so narrowly ignores the competition it faces from social media companies, Amazon, streaming TV providers and others who offer advertisers the means to reach online consumers.
Justice Department lawyers called witnesses to testify for two weeks before resting their case Friday afternoon, detailing the ways that automated ad exchanges conduct auctions in a matter of milliseconds to determine which ads are placed in front of which consumers and how much they cost.
The department contends the auctions are finessed in subtle ways that benefit Google to the exclusion of would-be competitors and in ways that prevent... Read More