Live from Cannes Lions Health: The first day of Cannes Lions kicked off with a quote from the famous Bill Bernbach: “All of us who professionally use the mass media are the shapers of society. We can vulgarize that society. We can brutalize it. Or we can help lift it onto a higher level.” With that, Matt Eastwood, Global Chief Creative Officer McCann Health challenged us to the true ambition of this show: fuel life-changing creativity. That work isn’t always an ad that sells a product, he explained; instead, sometimes it’s a creative act that shows the commitment a company is making to its customers.
From schools in India to wedding chapels in Vegas, Eastwood shared a range of creative acts that communicate the ethos of the companies they represent:
Vitamin D On The Agenda: The Diary Company, Kwality Limited has a strong corporate commitment to bringing better health to Indian consumers through its products and the vitamins and minerals that can be added to fortify them. In 2018, the Kwality team wanted to take additional action to overcome one persistently challenging number: 90% of children in India were deficient in Vitamin D. Fortifying the milk wasn’t enough. They needed a creative act to change behavior.
The easiest way to add Vitamin D is 15 – 20 minutes of direct exposure to sunlight. The richest sunlight comes between 11 AM - 1PM, a time when most of India’s children are in the classroom. Kwality sponsored an initiative to get them outside by moving the morning outside assembly to noon.
Noon Assembly is actively bringing sunlight back into children’s lives. The current counter shows them at over one thousand schools, 200 million minutes of sunlight, and counting. Eastwood said, “we didn’t make a television or print ad that told kids to get outside more. We looked at the problem and came up with a new solution.”
A Wedding Song For Every Couple: MGM Resorts International is based in the wedding capital of the world: Las Vegas. Customer feedback told them one aspect of even the best wedding ceremonies was still failing their critical same-sex couples segment: the wedding song. The love ballads always seemed to be a woman singing to a man or a man singing to a woman. MGM decided to change that; to create songs that sound like what modern marriages and relationships look like.
The album, Universal Love, includes reimagined love songs from artists like Bob Dylan, St Vincent and Kesha. The songs switch pronouns and change relationships so that every couple can have a love song that sounds like their love story.
People Invested In Your Neighborhood: Checkers is a burger shop that tends to serve ignored communities and geographies. Being part of those neighborhoods is part of who they are. It’s in their company DNA. It’s in Rick Ross’, too. The famous rapper grew up in Carol City, Florida, working at a car wash across the street from a Checkers. When he had a good day at the carwash, he went to Checkers.
He still does. In fact, he owns several of them. Ross teamed up with Checkers to buy the franchise on his old block and together they created a documentary that shows what Checkers means to kids growing up in the neighborhood and how people – like the team at Checkers and Ross – stay committed to those communities.
