OPEN CANVAS
Two experts pick their favourite out of home winners in what has been a standout year for the medium at the 2017 Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity
“It was just right… OOH at its best: brave and fun and smart and timeless and simple”
& EVE/DDB Richard Brim, executive creative director, Adam
So I’m sitting in the Palais on the first night of the Lions awards in Cannes in June. And I am there to pick up a couple of the little roaring beauts for a piece of work our agency produced for Skittles. As the other winners are announced, I have a varying range of reactions – as one does – while sniffing the bums of the competition. From “Da fuq?” to “That’s nice” to “No shit! ‘Fearless Girl’ won 97 Golds … and so it should.”
And then I saw “Pass the Heinz”.
At first, I thought: what’s all the fuss about? The art direction is old-fashioned and the line feels outdated. And then, at last, I twigged, and a huge surge of jealousy raged through my body.
For those of you who don’t know the idea, to prove the timelessness and love that people have for its Ketchup, Heinz decided to run the series of posters that a certain Mr Don Draper and Co presented to that brand 50 years earlier – in season six of Mad Men.
Ugh, it makes me sick – mainly because it was such a gift, handed on a Mad Men-shaped platter with a side order of Lucky Strikes and a tumbler of Scotch at three in the afternoon. Why no one else – including me – had thought to do it is beyond me, which makes this campaign even more annoying.
Running the exact executions, nothing was changed one little bit – not even the stock and quality of the photography, which was (to audience members in the know) slightly gimmicky. But then there was the wonderful co-credit, shared by David Miami and Stirling Cooper Draper Pryce.
It was just right. Wonderfully right, in fact. And as relevant now as then, because things are better with ketchup. This is OOH at its best: brave and fun and smart and timeless and simple.
While the smartarses in Miami plan what’s next, I’m off to smoke myself hoarse, down a bottle of single malt and be inappropriate.