Hasta La Ideas

At the Cannes Lions ad festival this week, CumminsNitro has picked up an astonishing three Grand Prixs, while Nike Battlefield took the Design prize

Australian agency CumminsNitro has won Grand Prixs in the PR, Direct and Cyber categories for its The Best Job in the World’ campaign for Tourism Queensland. The campaign offered one lucky person the chance to win a six-month contract to act as caretaker and promoter of Queensland’s Hamilton Island.

AKQA won the Grand Prix in the online advertising/innovative ideas category for its Fiat eco:Drive campaign, which also won Best in Book in CR’s Annual this year.

Last year, in what was, depending on your point of view, a bold move to embrace a new sector of visual communications or a shameless and cynical attempt to flog some more cash out of the creative indutries, Cannes launched a Design category, with the Grand Prix going to Turner Duckworth for its Coke identity work. Most of the entries however, came from ad agencies.

This year, it seems that the design world has started to take notice. Gold Lion winners include Williams Murray Hamm (for Jamie Oliver Recipease food kits), The Partners (for its Office Games identity for the Richard House hospice), and Pearlfisher (for Jamie Oliver’s JME food range). The likes of The Chase and Landor also feature among the winners, although the list is still ad agency dominated.

The Design Grand Prix has gone to McCann Worldgroup Causeway Bay, Hong Kong for Paper Battlefield, a series of 350 posters created by and featuring the teenage stars of the Nike Basketball League (which earned just a nomination at D&AD recently). Apparently,  the players themselves helped create the posters by silk screening images of themselves on top of one another in various combinations.

In other categories, FFL Paris won the press Grand Prix for its Wrangler campaign (which we wrote about here)

While the Outdoor Grand Prix went to TBWA\Hunt\Lascaris for its campaign for The Zimbabwean (which we wrote about here)