See you at Cannes Lions 2023
The Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, often referred to as the "Oscars of Advertising," is an annual celebration of creativity and innovation in the marketing world. The week-long festival of talks, workshops and networking events brings together the brightest minds in the industry to share marketing insights and trends, explore new media and tech, look to the future and, of course, compete for those coveted Lions awards.
Cannes Lions 2022 was a landmark year as Dentsu Creative made its debut as a new force in the industry. As dentsu’s new global creative network, we took the festival by storm with a series of events and activations that revealed our new structure, approach and philosophy of Modern Creativity.
Dentsu Creative was a major award winner in our debut year too, with Dentsu Creative Bengaluru picking up Titanium, three Grand Prix, one Gold, three Silver and three Bronze Lions for its ‘Unfiltered History Tour’ campaign for VICE media. This groundbreaking, AR-led campaign was the most awarded campaign of the festival, helping Dentsu Creative Bengaluru to claim the prestigious title of CANNES LIONS 2022 AGENCY OF THE YEAR, read more here.
After such a stellar year, Dentsu Creative is back and ready to make an impact again at Cannes Lions 2023. Here are just a few examples of Dentsu Creative’s integrated campaigns, activations and other work in contention for awards at this year’s festival – work that demonstrates our Modern Creativity proposition and our goal to Create Culture, Shape Society and Invent the Future.
Working with our health and pharmaceuticals client Eurofarma, our teams developed a digital tool that enables Parkinson’s patients to control their social media feeds using facial therapy exercises. The idea came from the insight that patients with Parkinson’s need to undergo physical therapy to slow the progression of their symptoms – but that finding the time to do this can often be a challenge.
Our solution - ‘Scrolling Therapy’ - uses facial recognition technology to transform the most important facial therapy exercises into the most common social media actions, enabling patients to control and interact with their social feeds using only their faces. After downloading the app to a phone or tablet, a brief tutorial loads and the app is automatically integrated with Facebook and Instagram. This pioneering technology has so far launched in 10 countries with over 45,000 doctors.
Gastón Cánaves & Agustín Alba, Executive Creative Directors at Dentsu Creative Argentina, said: “We believe that purpose is the key and this idea connected with it in the purest way that creative thinking can develop. We had a problem, we found a social insight and we've got the technology. And the solution of this equation was Scrolling Therapy. An idea which is helping millions of Parkinson's patients worldwide just hacking their spare time while using social media in order to encourage them to do their facial therapies.”
Read more
80% of children in rural India don’t have access to quality education. High-speed internet could fix this, but only 5% of the population has access to it. While infrastructure is being built to connect Indians to the internet eventually, completion dates are not in the immediate future.
With a vision to democratise education, The Everything Book connects disconnected kids with their dreams. Operating as an internet signal aggregator, this innovation combines weak 2G signals around it to form one strong Hyperspot giving these kids access to Vedantu’s curriculum for free.
Read more.
We partnered with Amnesty International to form the “Forgotten Team", to raise awareness about human rights abuse.
Read more.
We created an experience that brought the universe of The Last of Us to life. In Mexico City’s most iconic neighbourhood, we infected a billboard with Cordyceps. The hyper-real fungus spread from the billboard and took over everything around, infecting even a car and the street furniture.
Read more.
Fuelled by rising food prices, food bank use rose to its highest level in 2022 according to Food Banks Canada. When times get tough, Canadians tend to reach for lower priced packaged foods, ones that are likely to be more processed and less healthy.
Inflation Cookbook is a grocery shopping tool that predicts the biggest price drops of the week and generates chef-inspired recipes based on those ingredients – turning real-time price volatility into healthy and delicious real-time savings.
Read more.
The avant-garde electronic music festival, Jardim Sonoro, turned visual AI platform’s flaws into its 2022 edition artwork.
Read more.
World of Warcraft is a cultural phenomenon that once saw more than half of the population of Taiwan playing.
Fourteen years after its original release, World of Warcraft invited players to return to the frozen lands of Northrend to re-experience a beloved expansion with Wrath of the Lich King Classic. Partnering with Pili, the most iconic puppet show, World of Warcraft characters and scenes were created using Taiwan’s famous puppet show craftsmanship.
Read more.
KFC is the largest, most successful restaurant brand in China, with over 9,000 restaurants in 1,800 cities. Like every fast-food business, the brand relies on casual footfall. Young consumers hanging out with friends are key audiences who must be constantly recruited.
But by 2022 store traffic was suffering and business performance had declined by 16%. Innovation had helped the brand win with young Chinese consumers. But technologies (and generations) never stand still.
Gen Z have evolved: hanging out with friends is increasingly a virtual experience. 50% agree “I spend more time hanging out with friends in gaming environments than in the real world.” Many spend more time styling their avatars than themselves. How could KFC thrive in a world where a key consumption occasion was disappearing?
We created a virtual store experience hosted on China’s most popular platform for young people, QQ. Using Unreal Engine 4, the KFC Re:Store features avatar costumes and merchandise, tailormade furniture, a virtual pet named Fengwan and even our own currency, Chicken Coins - a first for the platform.
Users can dance, play, and hang out with friends and a virtual Colonel Saunders (the first non-player character on the platform). Within five weeks, 850 million chats with Colonel Sanders took place and 180 million virtual KFC food items had been sold. But what matters most is turning the virtual store into a real-world revenue driver. In a world first for the platform, users can order in the metaverse and have their order delivered in the real world.
Read more.
In April 2022, one news story devastated Italians: Italy failed to qualify for the World Cup. The most passionate football fans in the world had no one to cheer for. And Fonzies, the popular snack and official partner of the Italian football team, faced the same problem too.
But someone else qualified: Canada, the nation with the fewest football fans in the world. For Fonzies and all the Italian fans there was still hope.
Our idea saw Fonzies decide to create a fan club for Italians to support Canada, launching it through a national call to action. Within a few days, a community of millions was born and they cheered hard for Canada across Italian and Canadian cities. Even the Canadian Ambassador and Italian TV joined Forza Canada.
As millions of Italians became Canadian fans, Belgium vs Canada became the most-watched football match in Canadian history with 8.9 million Canadians and 10.1 million Italians (54% Italian viewers). The project totalled 80 million Global Impressions, while sales of Fonzies increased in just 3 matches: Canada vs Belgium +7%, Canada vs Croatia +12%, Canada vs Morocco + 18%.
Maurizio Tozzini, Executive Creative Director at Dentsu Creative Italy said: “It’s truly special when an entire nation chooses to support another one, it's something great that confirms that football is much more than just a sport.”
Read more.
Dentsu Creative talks and workshops at Cannes Lions 2023
Throughout the festival week, dentsu will host panel sessions at our famous Beach House with leading creatives, technologists and thinkers, as well as featuring in sessions and events across the Cannes Lions schedule. Here’s a flavour of what Dentsu Creative is up to this year.
Virtual Influencers: The future of Creative Risk-Taking
Thursday 22, 10.30-11am, The Forum, Palais I
The metaverse, AI and the blurring of our virtual and physical worlds are set to be big talking points at this year’s Cannes Lions. This session from Dentsu Creative will offer rich insights into these fast-growing areas of technology.
The session will introduce delegates to Rae, one of Asia’s top virtual influencers with a fanbase of over 1 million across Instagram and Weibo. As a virtual human who effortlessly treads the lines between fantasy, technology and reality, Rae offers a unique perspective through her collaborations with cult labels, musicians, fashion designers and global brands.
Rae will appear alongside her digital maker, Dentsu Creative Singapore’s CCO Stan Lim, and Bee Leng Tan of CapitaLand, where they will offer unprecedented insight into Rae’s world, exploring the potential, the opportunity and the tech that makes Virtual Influencers one of the industry’s most intriguing emerging trends.
Horizontal creativity as the gateway to growth and good
Tuesday 20, 12.00-1.00pm, Dentsu Beach House
In this essential session for marketers, Dentsu Creative’s award-winning Global Chief Strategy Officer, Patricia McDonald, unpacks our Global Creative Report, looking at the opportunities to embrace a new modern creative toolkit.
Walk the work
Thursday 22, 4.00-6.00pm, Dentsu Beach House
Strategists from Contagious will analyse the most innovative winners and trends from this year’s festival. They will unpack how creative campaigns have solved business challenges globally and present the key insights and learnings that will influence marketing and beyond in the year ahead.
See you at Cannes Lions 2023!
Cannes Lions is not just a gathering of industry professionals. It is a celebration of creativity, innovation and the power of marketing to shape culture and society – aims that we have put at the heart of our philosophy at Dentsu Creative. The festival brings together people from different backgrounds, cultures, and perspectives, fostering collaboration and inspiring new ideas. As Cannes Lions 2023 approaches, we eagerly await the opportunity to gather, learn, and be inspired with the rest of the industry.
Follow Dentsu Creative channels across Linkedin, Instagram and Facebook to preview Dentsu Creative contender work and stay up to date with our speakers, events and award wins during the festival using the official hashtag #CannesLions
