Creative Effectiveness
By Mary Maddever
A long – but never slow – pour of work for Heinz Ketchup claimed the Creative Effectiveness Grand Prix in Cannes today.
Rethink and Kraft Heinz earned the top honour for “It Has To Be Heinz,” a body of work spanning several years that included asking people (and AI) to draw ketchup, producing the pandemic’s most viral puzzle, spearheading lobbying efforts (from bun and hot dog math alignment to roman numeral protest), and jumping on socially-driven moments like “Seemingly Ranch.”
Creative Effectiveness jury president Harjot Singh, Global CSO at McCann, sums up the impact of the category by saying “we’re at a point where the urgency of stating, claiming and declaring the value that we create in business, in the world, in the industry, has never been greater,” adding that “creativity is a force multiplier, it is a superpower.”
To measure the superpower quotient of the work, he says the jury used an A-B-C-D framework:
A was for audacity and ambition – work that was harder to accomplish had an edge; B was for bravery – work that had “more courage embedded in the decisions at every point”; C was for causality – the more clearly established the better; and D was for direction – with the jury assessing “does this work have the capacity to direct the industry in such a way that clients have greater confidence in making more courageous decisions?”
Singh summed the ambition level of the “It Has To Be Heinz” challenge as “how do you take something that’s been around for 150 years and has stood for the exact same thing, and then reverse a five-year decline by actually sticking to the brand platform and continuously energizing it?”
“The bravery is to not flip the script and just say ‘old keys don’t open new locks, let’s change the strategy,'” Singh says. Instead, the team stuck with what the brand stands for and energized that in new ways, “which is huge for the industry.”
Singh says that through real-time responses to what’s going on in culture, “It Has To Be Heinz” had a coherent response each and every time, and the team was able to prove that the work had a real commercial impact on the business.
Describing the bar set for the Creative Effectiveness Grand Prix, Singh says the jury agreed it had to be “a totem,” which “is something you look towards for guidance, for courage, for reassurance and for just knowing that there is a way. A totem is what keeps you going.”
He adds that “It Has To Be Heinz” proved that a brand can be current and enduring at the same time. “This shows that, whilst everything changes, you can still respond to it in a way that’s authentic to your brand, and still captivate people – because at the end of the day, you only move a market to move people. And this is why I think this work has the capacity to direct the industry forward.”
Brand Experience & Activation
By Jennifer Horn
Not only did Rethink plant the Canadian flag on stage for Heinz, it was also invited to collect a Gold Lion for Coors Light.
The agency won yet another Gold for the “Coors Lights Out” campaign that began as a social post and blew up into a far-reaching, media-grabbing campaign for the beer brand.
It began when baseball superstar Shohei Ohtani broke the brand’s stadium ad with a foul ball during a game. The team jumped on the moment, embracing the blunder by removing pixels in billboards and defacing cans of Coors Light.
The prize was won in the Brand Activation & Experience category, where Anselmo Ramos, founder and creative chairman of Gut Global, set the jury room scene for reporters by listing some trends, as most jury presidents do in the press room each day in Cannes. Our ears perk up every time we hear a piece of work of Canada mentioned by name. But by the end of today’s session, our ears were on fire.
Ramos used three Rethink-led campaigns as examples of work that represent two major trends in the industry right now. “Coors Lights Out” and “Heinz Ketchup & Seemingly Ranch” were highlighted to denote a rise in “react-vertising” and the way brands are responding to real-time moments in culture. Molson’s “See My Name” was used to prop up a trend where brands take a backseat in the name of doing good.
The jury president also described the category as all-encompassing, where “anything can be a brand experience. That’s the beauty of this category. It’s very flexible by design.” He then revealed the Grand Prix winner –”The First Edible Mascot” by Pop-Tarts and Weber Shandwick in New York – which he lauded for being “weird, bizarre, uncomfortable, genius.”
Ramos said the jury wanted to send a message to the industry by selecting the Pop-Tarts work for the top medal. “I think our industry is very serious right now. There’s a lot of purpose-driven work, which is fine, but it’s time for advertising to have more fun. So, people, please, it’s just advertising. Next time, remember, a joke can become a Grand Prix.”
