Adidas’ “Liquid Billboard” has won the Outdoor Grand Prix at Cannes Lions, in what the jury said signified the brand’s big “welcome back” against competitor Nike.
The campaign, by Havas Middle East and Jack Morton Middle East, saw the brand erect a giant billboard filled with water on a Dubai beach in order to promote its range of inclusive swimwear, inviting swimmers to take a dip inside.
The Liquid Billboard was a mini-swimming pool five meters high and three meters deep, made of reinforced transparent acrylic and holding 11,500 gallons of water. It went live June 24 last year for three days on a public beach, where swimmers, including amputee triathlete Dareen Barbar and Saudi Arabian climber Raha Moharrak, took a dip. At the same time, live footage from inside the billboard was streamed on a digital screen at the Dubai Mall ice rink next to the Adidas flagship store.
Eugene Cheong, chief creative officer at DDB Asia and president of the Outdoor jury, said the work was “a billboard that will make you stop and wonder. It's a classic traffic stopper. A spectacle in the genre.”
Cheong added that it also welcomed Adidas back to the game, adding “for too long the brand has been lagging on the sidelines while Nike has been running rings around it. It's like Adidas waking up and taking a megaphone and blasting 'Impossible is Nothing'," he observed.
Pepsi's "Better With Pepsi" campaign by Alma DDB was another strong contender in the category, winning three Gold Lions.
Cheong said that Pepsi's “concept was great” but the innovation lay more in the “clever media placement,” where the brand placed ads near restaurants that didn't serve Pepsi but its competitor, Coca-Cola.
Cheong said that one thing the jury noticed this year was a lack of good copywriting. "Lines on billboards have become as characterless as text on websites, and copywriting has degenerated into text writing," he observed.
Another criticism he made of work entered into the category were entries that focused on purpose work without deeper meaning. "Lots of brands are trying to do good but all of us can spot bullsh*t from 100 paces. We can tell if you are a bandwagon jumper."
