Special Group New Zealand won the Health & Wellness Grand Prix for its campaign for life insurance company Partners Life at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity on Monday.
Piggybacking on the popular New Zealand TV crime drama “The Brokenwood Mysteries,” this dark campaign brings back to life the characters who have been killed each week. Special Group convinced the show’s producers, South Pacific Pictures, to add an extra scene just before the credits roll.
At the end of each episode, a recently-murdered character opens his or her eyes from atop a slab in the morgue to express surprise at having been killed, talk about their death and stress the importance of life insurance.
After the first episode, actress Meryl Main, who played Janis, the first murder victim, said, “Well this is unexpected ... what are my boys going to do without their mummy now. Sorry lads, there’s no life insurance policy.”
A call to action then encourages viewers to “plan ahead and get life right” with Partners Life.
It wasn’t easy to get South Pacific Pictures on board with the idea, Lisa Fedyszyn, executive creative director at Special NZ, told B&T. But by explaining how the campaign would create extra talk about the show, the company was convinced.
“By understanding what was in it for a team of partners who typically shied away from advertising, we created breakthrough work that helped a brand weave its way into the most unlikely of places—a prime-time television show,” Fedyszyn said.
The message reached 59% of New Zealanders, with brand consideration up 5%, brand awareness up 6% and appetite for life insurance up 12%, according to Fedyszyn.
Among the gold winners was CALM’s “The Last Photo” from adam&eveDBB and British broadcaster ITV.
The campaign, which was created to challenge assumptions of what suicide looks like, posted 50 smiling portraits on London’s South Bank before revealing to the public two days later that they were the last images of people who had taken their own lives. It brought a 400% year-over-year increase in donations to the Campaign Against Living Miserably (CALM) and also won this year's Ad Age’s Creativity Awards Idea of the Year.
Another Gold Lion winner was the “Working With Cancer” campaign from Publicis, which also won Cannes Health Grand Prix for Good. Supported by Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, Macmillan Cancer Research and the Gustave Roussy Institute, it is a global cross-industry coalition initiative to end the stigma of cancer in the workplace.
In addition to out-of-home and partnerships with influencers, the accompanying 75-second spot, directed by Haya Waseem through Object & Animal, follows workers in a variety of roles trying to do their jobs while hiding the struggles of living with cancer.
Claritin’s “DiversiTree Project” which tackled a decades-long botanical sexism issue, also took home a Gold Lion. The campaign and accompanying video from Energy BBDO explain how cities and landscapers have planted too many male trees—which spew pollen and cause allergies—because they don’t produce fruit and make less of a mess on sidewalks. In partnership with the National Arbor Day Foundation’s Community Canopy program, the Bayer brand distributed free female trees to people who will plant them.
