It’s not everyday you get to watch an advertising hotshot like Aaron Starkman bare his agency’s secrets to a crowd of hungry creatives. Yet that’s exactly what the Rethink global CCO did Monday afternoon in Cannes, mere hours before hitting the stage to collect the one-and-only Gold Outdoor Lion for Canada.
The medal went to “Coors Lights Out,” an awards-circuit darling (having also snagged a Silver earlier today) that started as a social post and snowballed into an epic, integrated campaign. As it has been known to do, the agency jumped on a cultural moment that bled across markets and media. It all began when baseball superstar Shohei Ohtani broke the brand’s stadium ad with a foul ball during a game. What was left was a black pixel and a defaced can of Coors Light.
“It was embarrassing,” Starkman (pictured, center) admitted to the audience during a session that also saw Edelman’s global CCO Judy John (pictured, left) and Saatchi & Saatchi Australia’s CCO Mandie van der Merwe (pictured, right) reveal the ingredients that led their teams to craft world-famous work.
Embarrassing as it was, Starkman’s team knew it had a “Go, then Grow” idea in its grasp. He described the method as “pouring gasoline on the fire of a social post that takes off.” He sent a single text to his Coors Light client with the idea to lean in and run with the (slightly) disfigured can in a post, which quickly escalated to also removing pixels from the design of a handful of collector beer cans and stadium billboards, and led to Coors demand in Japan.
The instantly viral work is no different from Rethink’s “Heinz Ketchup & Seemingly Ranch” campaign (another big Cannes contender) in the sense that it also began with the agency getting the brand to hit “go” on a social post and then watching it “grow” before investing media dollars – one of the many not-so-secret formulas that Starkman and others leaders at the shop have been known to freely share in an open source way. (In fact, tools like this were immortalized in a book the agency’s co-founders penned as a farewell gift to the industry.)
A self-proclaimed extroverted introvert, Starkman says he despises 100-person meetings and weekend-consuming client pitches. The way out, he says, is by doing award-winning work. The CCO has found the press generated from winning work attracts clients, and thereby reduces pitches.
Two days after picking up Gold at Cannes in 2023, for example, a marketer emailed to ask if Rethink could emulate the same success for their brand. It’s a strategy that works for the agency, and considering the sheer number of Best of Shows and Independent Agency of the Year awards it’s been picking up lately, even less time will need to be devoted to pitches.
