Each year News Corp runs a Young Lions Competition as part of the 63rd Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity – with three winning teams scoring flights and tickets to the event in France.
The winning duo from the media industry were Nelson Demartini and Roisin Rafferty from UM and Carat in Queensland.
On my first time around the awards hall yesterday looking at the shortlists for the PR, Media and Direct advertising categories, I was dumbstruck with awe by every second idea. On my second wander around I realised that I was being impressed in two very distinct ways.
The first are the truly colossal ideas. The kinds that are incredibly ambitious in scope, scale, coordination and organisation. The kinds of ideas that you look at and have no idea know where or how they would have even started bringing it to life.
Ideas like:
In Australia the waste products from Beers like XXXX get reused as ingredients in Vegemite. In New Zealand they used waste products from beer to create a 98 Octane Petrol. Not only were they able to make the petrol from beer by-products in the first place but they were able to have it stocked at major petrol retailer Gull. The level of negotiations and logistics that would have been required by this project blow my mind. That and the fact that they allowed consumers to save the world by drinking beer.
Head & Shoulders Israel: Divine Sampling
Israel had a major problem. 50% of Israelis had dandruff but didn’t know it. This is where Head & Shoulders had a brilliant insight. At Passover Israelis ritually clean their houses of un-Kosher items such as breadcrumbs but were missing the crumbs of dandruff in their hair.
To help them out they bought the entire countries supply of Passover kits and inserted a dandruff strips in them alongside the traditional prayer candle and dustpan. Not only that but they then had them distributed though the nations Synagogues.
Common sense tells me that getting a religion to sell shampoo should have been impossible. But they managed it, finding a home for all 250,000 kits and growing their market share by 35%.
These ideas are impressively massive. But somehow I always find myself just as impressed with the ideas on the other end of the spectrum. Those ideas that are so brutally simple, so seemingly obvious, yet have never been done before.
Ideas like:
Saltwater Brewery: Edible Six Pack Ring
Six pack rings have been the scourge of the sea since their introduction in the 60s, trapping millions of fish and choking countless turtles. To solve this Saltwater Brewery simply made their six pack rings out of material turtles and fish could eat.
Contours: Baby Stroller Test Ride:
It’s very hard for parents to know what stroller will be most comfortable for their baby. The solution? Make a stroller big enough for the parents to sit in.
These ideas are so simple that you can do them justice explaining them in one or two short sentences.
Ad agencies love to talk about 'big ideas' but these actually fall into two categories and big doesn’t always have to mean complex.
