Cannes predictions: Prasoon Joshi

Campaign Asia-Pacific asked several leading creatives from around the region to share their predictions about work from the region that could bring home metal from this year's Cannes Lions 60th International Festival of Creativity, taking place from 16-22 June. Look for the other installments in this series, and check out all of our Cannes coverage before, during and after the festival.

The Lions are around the corner. The metals remain coveted as ever, the jury as eclectic and the anticipation edgier. New categories like Best Use of Technology are adding to the brew.

So which work is likely to strike metal. Frankly, prediction is not possible at Cannes. While significant work on mainstream brands has made its presence felt, many's the time that pieces from new and lesser-known brands, causes and regions have garnered the shinier metal. Cannes is all about surprises. As much about that one Cinderella piece of work becoming the princess of the Croisette as it’s about crowning the most deserving, however obvious.

Having said that, here’s a look at some works that have made their presence felt in Asia-Pacific in charming, effective and impactful ways. Hopefully, they will do so in Cannes as well.

So first up, in no order of preference, two pieces of work from Down Under.

‘Volunteer to promote volunteering’ treaded a different route by asking not just the general public, but also corporates advertisers and broadcasters to volunteer 'space'—from Facebook pages to profile pictures to airtime and hoardings—to promote and raise awareness for the Seek volunteer website. The campaign saw tremendous results. The integrated use of media with a high level of public and personal involvement was finely done and its one of the better executed and presented cases.This campaign managed to get mind-space and more.

Totally disarming and memorable is ‘Dumb ways to die’, demonstrating that however strong the clamour behind ‘create a great viral campaign', it doesn’t happen—great campaigns go viral. Tackling the dark issue of accidents and death with a tongue-in-cheek approach to promote train safety, the simple animation and music seeped infectiously into popular consciousness. Inspirational. And a hot favourite with many.

Another piece of work that could be considered technologically interesting would be the TedX Mimeisthai—a speech-recognition trending engine that captured snippets of live banter. Then, feeding these conversations into data visualisation, created a sound cloud. Every conversation became a sort of conversation point. Interesting enough for the judges to have a chat. 

It’s both an interesting and challenging time for our industry as it gets redefined. Straddling contrasting ends of a world, where some beliefs still go by the book, while others are recast with 'Spring revolutions' triggered on Facebook and other social media. Today, a climate change conference is no longer just attended by the official national reps, but can invite real-time twitter involvement from across the world. Content is now democratised; consumers are now co-creators, from the honing of digital skills, there’s’ now talk of singularity—of man and machine being one. To create work that rises above the challenge of this changing world, media and mind space around us is no mean feat.

The main reason these pieces of work stood out for me is that these ideas have an inherent amoeba-like quality. They can mutate and morph in many dimensions. Of course there could be many more in the running, like NRMA’s ‘Create your own car’ or the ‘Beyond the wall’ campaign for Mountain Dew bringing street art and graffiti to life. The creative spirit thrives on being tested. Cheers. Let’s go hunting.