Boxing, Booty Calls, Chocolate & Herpes
...Cannes might divide people. But one thing it wasn't, this year, was dull.
Bonjour!
Last week I went to the Cannes Lions. Indeed, dear Reader, if you can endure the sight of my knees, here’s me being interviewed on the subject of funny ads:
As I’ve mentioned before in B&H, Cannes divides people. But think about the international events in sport, politics or business that don’t divide people and aren’t fraught with politics (e.g.: the FIFA World Cup, the G7 summit, Davos). Without wishing to sound like an apathetic middle-aged man1, there’s always going to be a bit of discord.
But enough of politics! Let’s look at some funny ads, yeah?
Cannes introduced the Use of Humour sub-category in the autumn of 2023. This week I’m going to do a quick overview of the key winners.
Next week: other bits and bobs that I loved.
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If you go on the metallic qualities of the Lions — Gold, Silver, Bronze — top prize this year went to a Saudi agency for their Obsession commercial. This advertised the bout between Tyson Fury and Oleksander Usyk:
Nice work, but in many ways the post-production (below) distracted from the actual, well, message.
I admired the special effects, rather than thinking: “I’d like to watch that fight”. And — to me, at least — admiring the special effects but forgetting the message is a bit like saying, of a restaurant, that the service is perfect but the food’s horrible.
A big humour winner was The Best Place in the World to have Herpes, a New Zealand campaign that featured retro-graphics. It was a great, fresh take on the virus. Indeed, in the final press conference of Cannes, one of the judges noted that she had learnt “everyone in this room has herpes, lying dormant within them, including you.” If there was ever a good way to charm hundreds of journalists, she did it.
Another winner here was Xbox’s The Cheeky Controller that turned Deadpool’s bottom into a limited-edition Xbox controller. Commercially successful, and very much hitting the cultural moment, it was a nice product with plenty of advertising and PR mileage. Bottoms up.
I rather liked this Twix Harmoniser campaign (below). Why? Well, let’s face it: tech can too often seem an irrelevant add-on, diluting a key message rather than enhancing it. Here, Twix did something techy and mischievous and turned it into a warm ad. Take a wee look:
It’s also a good example of a brand doing a multi-character funny ad well — something that is surprisingly rare and sometimes misguided (because it lacks the in-depth exploration of a central character2).
It also reminded me of a superb Vodafone campaign from 20 years ago.
Lastly, a great piece of work was by IKEA, in their U Up? campaign, featuring very suggestive texts that people got at 2am. If they answered, IKEA gave them 15% off a new mattress. The campaign won them a stack of sales while the suggestiveness of U Up? got stacks of media coverage.
Simple, nice, amusing, naughty. Not for the first time — and I’d say not for the last — IKEA hit it out of the park. What’s more, they’re one of the best examples of a well-known brand alluding to sex with humour: there aren’t many of those. Take this little gem of a Valentine’s Day ad below from 2014.
Next week: other funny stuff that I think should have made it to the winners’ podium (spoiler alert: there’s lots).
But, mercifully for y’all, no more videos of me in shorts.
Just photos.
Many thanks for reading,
Paddy
I support West Ham: given their results this past season, apathy comes naturally to me.
More on this in next week’s issue.