Hasta La Ideas

While the Cannes Lions festival is largely about celebrating what’s happened over the past year in advertising and design, it also aims to help agencies and brands seek out new talent. Of the various programmes set up to help this happen, one of the most established (now in its seventh year) is the Future Lions. Here are the results of this year’s competition…

Set up by AKQA, the Future Lions is open to students (of all disciplines, not just advertising). Entrants are asked to submit work that responds to a simple, if tough, challenge: Advertise a product from a global brand in a way that couldn’t be done five years ago, to an audience of your choosing. Five projects are chosen as winners each year. Here are this year’s winning projects, all of which show how brands can use technology to make life easier or more fun for their customers:

Made By Waves by Patrik Beskow and David Lunde of Berghs School of Communication

Made By Waves is a proposal for Quiksilver. Beskow and Lunde suggest that the surfing brand install a set of waverollers at Huntington Beach, CA, where a major Quiksilver factory is placed, and produce a product line from the wave power produced by the rollers, which will literally be ‘made by waves’. The film above explains the project in more detail.

Penguin Soundtracks by Lisa Zeitlhuber and Nicholas Partyka of Miami Ad School Hamburg

This project proposes that Penguin join forces with Spotify to create a series of soundtracks for its books that can be listened to when the book is being read on an electronic device. Users can also create their own bespoke book soundtracks via Spotify.

Blackout Recorder by Florian Weitzel and Yvonne Truun of Miami Ad School Berlin

The Blackout Recorder app can be set up before a big night out, so that you can retrieve your lost party memories the next day. It can also prevent you engaging in any drunk dialling, by allowing users to block use of certain phone numbers.

Bing Automatic by Chris Shelfon and Marybeth Ledesma of VCU Brandcenter

One of those ideas that feels like it should already exist, Bing Automatic is a search engine that tracks your Word documents, Power Point docs, Outlook and so on as you work on them, offering up suggestions of searches that you might need so you don’t need to switch to a web browser to find them. The film above explains the idea in more detail.

Post from Japan by Kristofer Salsborn and Rickard Beskow of Berghs School of Communication

Post from Japan is a project that aims to encourage visitors to Japan to share their images during their stay there, in order to encourage tourists back to the country. Using the application Post from Japan, which is connected to the government network, visitors would be able to upload their photos for free, and then would be given free internet access to use while abroad, depending on the amount of likes each image receives.

For more info on the Future Lions, visit futurelions.com or the facebook.com/futurelions.