This year saw a very high standard of work. We eventually got down from a total of 148 entries to 12 that really delivered against the core judging criteria; work founded on compelling human and cultural insights leveraged through technology that drove business results.
This manifested in different ways across the entries. With Foxtel ‘Monty’ and Google Fantasy Assistant it leveraged insights about sports fans to transform the experience of consuming cricket and football (as well as boosting the relevance and effectiveness of communications), whilst Huawei we saw the imaginative reapplication of their AI technology to help deaf children and their families enjoy reading and books; doing good whilst also doing wonders for humanising the brand.
It was good to see the entries that used platforms to engage people to social issues (as with Danish charity Danner’s domestic violence work using Instagram Stories or the ‘Breast Buffering’ Breast Cancer example from Indian streaming company AltBalaji), but also the ethical questions around privacy and data security that we need to tackle. In the case of The Google Pegasus work, this led to the development of a technical solution to creating relevant communications, but without the need to extract personal data.
The judges also rewarded entries that also had the potential to be scalable and repeatable. Glade’s re-use of packaging as a sampling opportunity was a beautifully integrated piece of work, bringing together a category challenge with a great insight to create an entirely new sampling vehicle in the packing itself. Smart, integrated and scaled with retail partner Walmart – this is work that breaks new ground.
Like Glade, our Crème de la Crème also coupled imagination with a deep understanding of media in the context of digital retail platforms to ‘hack’ Amazon and give Cheerios a massive boost. By linking a mass sampling exercise to Prime Day, they reached out to a mass of new users and ensured that they became top of mind/top of algorithm across the platform in the US. This initiative drove demonstrable success for Cheerios and it’s one that we are sure we will see reapplied globally. Well done.