Women's financial freedom won over the portrayal of the women at risk in their relationships in the Glass Lion for Change, as “Data Tienda” from DDB Mexico for WeCapital took the Grand Prix.

Outgoing Meta Platforms Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg also got a shoutout from Ascential Events & Intelligence CEO Philip Thomas as the woman who instigated the Glass Lions in a meeting 10 years ago as he reminisced about the award's origins. The Glass Lion recognizes work that addresses gender inequality or prejudice.

What it was

“Data Tienda,” which won Grand Prix in the Creative Data Lions category earlier in the week, is a program designed to address the fact that 83% of women in Mexico have no bank payment history, hence they can’t start businesses because they have no access to credit. Yet nearly all the women actually have long credit histories in the paper records of thousands of shopkeepers. So a system was set up to have women name five trusted shopkeepers, then collect qualitative and quantitative data from the shops via WhatsApp bots to create credit scores for the women.

Within three months, more than 10,000 women received credit histories with help from more than 5,000 shopkeepers. And 23% of those women received microcredit loans from banks.

Why it won

“The two things that we ended up talking about and looking at the most was to what extent creativity was used as a tool to affect the change,” said Colleen DeCourcy, jury president and chief creative officer of Snap, “and then did the work spark a long-term change that can continue to grow and carry on? And the piece that was selected did exactly that.”

The jury

At one point, the jury deadlocked on a decision when all the women voted one way and all the men voted another, DeCourcy said. “And one of the men on the jury said, ‘Well, this clearly affected all the women, so I’m changing my vote.’” The man on the jury, who declined to be identified, confirmed this.

Controversy, or clear winner? 

There was some lengthy discussion on the jury about the ultimately Gold Lion-winning “Don’t Ever Leave Me” campaign from Ogilvy, Athens, for Lacta, a chocolate brand known for its long history of romantic short films celebrating love. Greece has had an epidemic of men murdering women they love when they try to end the relationship. So, for International Women’s Day, Ogilvy created a film with a much darker love story where a man kills a woman who tries to leave. The film was the most-watched in Greece for 10 days, sparking considerable media coverage and calls to police from women at risk.

“We talked a lot about it, you know, and we ended up coming down on the side of what would live on as a systemic change,” DeCourcy said.

Notable news

“Data Tienda” continued at least a mini-trend of original products and services taking Grand Prix at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity. VMLY&R came home with two Grand Prix—one in Pharma, for an online tool to help people archive their voices before they lose them, and one in Health & Wellness, for a mosquito repellent that also kills mosquito larvae when thrown away.