HBO's "Westworld: The Maze" from Dentsu Aegis Network's 360i wins the Grand Prix in Radio and Audio at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity.
To promote the second season of the HBO series, 360i re-created the fictional universe in the show on Amazon Alexa devices. Listeners could dive into the world on a choose-your-own-adventure-type basis.
The experience involved 11,000 lines of script, more than 60 storylines and 36 actors, including fan favorites like Jeffrey Wright’s Bernard/Arnold and Angela Sarafyan’s Clementine. Participants spent an average of 14 minutes in "The Maze" and the game garnered more than 500 million earned media impressions.
"This is completely pushing the boundaries," says Jose Miguel Sokoloff, Radio and Audio jury president and president of MullenLowe Group Creative Council and CCO of MullenLowe Group U.K. "You feel like you are actually in the world. It's well written, the craft is incredible. There's nothing wrong with it."
Sokoloff says while Alexa has been used in campaigns before, this was the first time participants were truly "immersed and interacted" with the skill for a long period of time.
He says despite the Radio and Audio category having "gone through difficult times" (radio is still a medium in decline), audio in particular is expanding to create "a new frontier."
"Audio is what isolates us from the world if we want to [be] isolated from the world," Sokoloff adds. "It’s exploding but still retains the magic of being one of the few categories that has zero barriers for a person with a pen, paper, idea and a voice to change the world. That’s the beauty of the category."
