V-Line wins Cannes Grand Prix

Warc, 17 June 2014

CANNES: 'Guilt Trips', a campaign from McCann Melbourne for V/Line, a regional Australian train service, has won the Grand Prix at the 2014 Cannes Creative Effectiveness Lions.

In addition to the Grand Prix, the judges awarded a total of six Lions to the 12 entries that had been shortlisted from an initial 80. (Warc subscribers can browse the full case studies of all 80 entries here). While praising the insights that the winners had produced, the business results that Guilt Trips had generated been an important factor in it taking the top prize.

"For each of the winners, the insight connected to the brand strategy was extremely strong," said John Zeigler, CEO, DDB Asia Pacific. "It's very important to look at the insights, not just the creativity and the effectiveness."

But the winning campaign, said David Sable, Y&R CEO and one of the judges, "had an insight that was so fresh and so universal that we all on the jury wanted to form a company and sell it to every travel company in the world. This case would work anywhere in the world."

Greg Lyons, vp/marketing, Mountain Dew & Energy, PepsiCo was especially impressed by the ROI from a limited budget. "This case was the one of all of them that was the tightest and left absolutely no doubt whatsoever that the marketing idea led to commercial growth," he stated.

Two more Australian campaigns picked up Lions – How Brad Pitt's bro' helped Virgin Mobile punch above its weight, from Havas Worldwide Australia for Virgin's mobile phone business, and Australia Day, from DDB Sydney for fast food chain McDonald's.

Three of the remaining four winners came from UK agencies: Don't raise money, make money, from Publicis London for The Depaul Box Company, an offshoot of the homeless charity Depaul UK; Travel yourself interesting, from Ogilvy & Mather Advertising in London for travel website Expedia; and Weave your magic, from Wieden + Kennedy in London for Lurpak butter, the Arla Foods brand.

The final winner was Dove, the Unilever soap brand, for its Real Beauty Sketches campaign created by Ogilvy Brasil.

"The judging process was very rigorous," declared Sable, who said that the panel had set out to "cut through the digi-babble" and relate metrics to effectiveness.

He added that he saw Creative Effectiveness as "one of the most important categories, because it's a defining category in where our industry is going".

Data sourced from Cannes Lions; additional content by Warc staff