WHAT WON AND WHY: The Cyber Jury, led, by Jury President Colleen Decourcy, Wieden & Kennedy, global chief creative officer, named three Grand Prix winners.
One Grand Prix went to the Aland Index/Baltic Sea Project, for the Bank of Aland and created out of RBK Communication, Stockholm. The project included a biodegradable credit card, the Baltic Sea Card. It can track the carbon footprint of all its users' purchases through the Aland Index, which the bank developed with MasterCard and KPMG. With each banking statement, card users will see the environmental impact of their spending that month and receive options on how they can compensate for it through behavior changes or by donating to local or global initiatives.
Another Grand Prix went to "Meet Graham," the grotesque depiction of how a human body would need to be formed in order to best withstand a car accident, created out of Clemenger BBDO Melbourne for the Transport Accident Commission Victoria. This is the campaign's second Grand Prix of the week, after it earned the first top Lion of the festival in Health and Wellness.
Mailchimp's "Did You Mean Mailchimp" campaign, created out of Droga5 New York, earned the third Grand Prix. The effort raised awareness of the Mailchimp brand by creating bits of pop culture out of "mistaken" versions of the Mailchimp name. For example, it included a trio of bizarre shorts, "Mail Shrimp," Jail Blimp," and "Kale Limp," which played in theaters; a new men's style fad, the "male crimp," a music video by the made-up band "VeilHymn" and even a new snack brand, Fail Chips. All the initiatives, of course, tied back to the correctly-spelled "Mailchimp." The idea centered on research that found people regularly mispronounce or screw up the brand's name.
WHY THEY WON: DeCourcy said that "it got heated trying to figure out what represented this category--are we awarding the future, artifacts of our time? We didn't want to celebrate stunts." She described Cyber as "a place as much as anything."
The three winners reflected different variations on this idea. The Aland campaign, she said "is a place where businesses can be more closely connected to the world." She described TAC's "Meet Graham" as a "social object, something put out into the world that grabbed people's attention and people just couldn't look away. It couldn't have happened without technology." Yet it's also a "place where you can tangibly touch things made better and more clear through technology." And MailChimp is "a place where light ideas move quickly in the marketplace of attention."
In the case of this award, the jury had looked at what Cyber means in world where we now say "everything is digital and television is going away. It leads you to wonder, 'What the hell does a major massive campaign look like these days?' We looked for something that truly had Cyber at its core and we felt did the job any mass campaign, and this did it creatively, with charm and style and wit."
