Suncorp's campaign showcased how new materials could help save homes.
The Innovation Lions Grand Prix went, perhaps surprisingly, to an insurance company, Suncorp Group. The “One House to Save Many” campaign, created by Leo Burnett, Sydney, highlights weather-resilient housing that could withstand climate devastation.
“It’s not exciting and innovating when you say, ‘it’s an insurance company,’” said Jury Chair Cleve Gibbon, chief technology officer at Wunderman Thompson USA. But “I had goosebumps,” Gibbon said of the campaign.
The campaign showed how new materials could go into housing to help withstand floods, cyclones and fires, the kind that wipe out millions of acres of land each year in Australia. “The world is changing around us,” Gibbon said. “The climate is changing around us.”
Production collaborators on the campaign included Revolver and The Glue Society.
The jury was looking for brands that came to Cannes with a purpose, above and beyond “table stakes,” Gibbon said. The award was about “ideas that needed amplification, scaling to the public consciousness,” Gibbon said.
There was debate in the jury room, Gibbon said, when it came to looking at corporate responsibility. The jury did not want to award the top prize in innovation to any brand that may have done a good deed if it felt like something the brand should be doing anyway.
Gibbon pointed to the winner of another award in the mobile category—Google, which won for its “Real Tone” campaign, showcasing how the company developed a better camera to capture more skin tones and their natural qualities. That’s been a persistent problem with technology, especially cameras.
“For Google to do that is great,” Gibbon said, “but it should have been done earlier.”
Meanwhile, the Innovations Gold Lion went to “McEnroe Vs. McEnroe,” from Anheuser-Busch InBev’s Michelob Ultra, a campaign idea created by FCB New York.
