The Social Media Stats Behind The 37 Cannes Lions Titanium Winners: Part 1

The Cannes Lions have once again highlighted the best creative campaigns from around the world. This year 37 different campaigns made it to the Titanium and Integrated category – often considered to be the pinnacle category that every agency wants to win. This year there were:

• Two Grand Prix winners
• Five Titanium Winners
• One Gold Winner
• Three Silver Winners
• Five Bronze Winners
• 21 Shortlisted Winners

All but one of the campaigns relied heavily on social media as a key driver of the initiative, which means that Unmetric is in the perfect position to peek behind the curtains and check out the social media stats of these Cannes Lions winners.

Samsung: Hearing Hands
Shortlisted in the Titanium & Integrated category
Agency: Leo Burnett Istanbul

Life can be a challenge for those with disabilities living in Turkey. To announce the launch of it’s new customer service channel for those with hearing impairments, Samsung decided to give one man a day he wouldn’t forget.

The campaign generated over 280,000 shares and 8.8m interactions in total (including video views) on Facebook alone. Over on YouTube, the video generated nearly 5.4m views with an overwhelmingly positive response. Ironically, the same video uploaded by another channel has drawn in over 10.5m views.

AllState: Social Savvy Burglar
Silver in the Titanium & Integrated category
Agency: Leo Burnett Chicago

Bringing Mayhem to those that tend to overshare what they are doing on social media, AllState took the insight that burglars were trawling through social media accounts looking for people telling everyone that they were not at home. To hit home the message about the dangers of oversharing, AllState mascot, Mayhem started a live auction of a couple’s possessions after they tweeted to the world that they were not at home but at the Sugar Bowl game. The auction quickly went viral on Twitter with the victims powerless to stop it.

I’m a social media savvy burglar. I’m selling everything these people own while they’re out. Buy now. #MayhemSale https://t.co/KJacMuncx4

— Mayhem (@Mayhem) January 2, 2015

The hashtag #mayhemsale was used 66 times by the @Mayhem handle and over 11,500 times by users, helping it to trend around the world for a brief period of time. The handle added over 25,000 new followers in 24 hours, a 47% increase and generated mentions from influencers with hundreds of thousands of followers.

Benjamin Moore: Green Monster
Silver in the Titanium & Integrated category
Agency: The Martin Agency

The Green Monster, for those of you less well informed about baseball (and don’t feel bad because I too, had to Google it), is a 37 foot high wall at the Boston Red Sox stadium, Fenway Park. It has always been painted green, hence the Green Monster.

Launched in early August, the campaign had a social good element wherein Benjamin Moore would use proceeds from every sale to help rejuvenate ballparks around the city of Boston. The campaign didn’t particularly resonate too well on social media with the advert attracting less than 15,000 views and the post on Facebook earning just 329 shares.

John Lewis: Monty’s Christmas
Bronze in the Titanium & Integrated category
Agency: Adam&Eve DDB

Some say that you know it’s Christmas when Coca-Cola starts running it’s Holidays Are Coming ads, but John Lewis, the British department store retailer, is making a bid to change that. For the last few years, John Lewis has been responsible for some of the most eagerly awaited holiday ads in the UK. Last year saw The Bear & The Hare video rack up 15m views, but Monty’s Christmas blew past that with over 23m views.

Not ones to miss a trick, of course the cute and cuddly Monty (and Mindy, of course) were available to buy in all John Lewis stores.

On Facebook, Monty’s Christmas was a two month long campaign for John Lewis. There were 32 pieces of content about Monty published with the original post featuring the video seeing over 160,000 Shares but the campaign as a whole saw 250,000 Likes and 170,000 Shares.

Samsung: Look at Me
Shortlisted in the Titanium & Integrated category
Agency: Cheil Worldwide

People with autism have trouble identifying emotions in others, making it difficult for parents and other family members to connect with their child. Working on the insight that autistic children can immerse themselves in various apps on their phone or tablet, Samsung brought together leading experts on autism in Korea to develop an app that can help develop emotional cognition skills.

With just under 160,000 views between them, the two videos that were uploaded on the Samsung Tomorrow YouTube channel didn’t generate any spectacular numbers in terms of views or interactions compared to some of the other Cannes Lions Titanium winners. However, perhaps more meaningful than interactions is can be seen in the transformation of the children after using the Look at Me app for several weeks.

Samsung Canada also picked up this initiative in May 2015, with one post generating over 700 Shares, making it the second most popular piece of content that it has published in the last 12 months.

Optus: Clever Buoy
Titanium in the Titanium & Integrated category
Agency: M&C Saatchi

Shark attacks are a very real danger around the coast of Australia. Alarmed by the decision to cull the shark population, but also keen to demonstrate its robust mobile network, Optus worked with marine engineers to create sonar buoys that could identify sharks in the vicinity and send alerts to the relevant authorities so that they could bring everyone out of the sea and not have to resort to culling.

Optus saw over 450,000 views on its YouTube video, although it isn’t the most popular on its channel, that goes to a rather droll ad featuring Ricky Gervais.

Over on Facebook, the campaign resonated quite well, although it certainly wasn’t the most engaging content published by Optus. Another video by the telecom brand that shows people how to turn your smartphone into a projector received twice the number of shares.

Foot Locker: Horse With Hardon
Bronze in the Titanium & Integrated category
Agency: BBDO New York

Challenging basketball fans around the world to send their craziest dunks and trick shots, Foot Locker brought in James Hardon to create a Hardon vs Internet showdown.

#HorseWithHarden is heating up! Get your submissions in TODAY! RULES: http://t.co/wh3fakU40U pic.twitter.com/AYZEFVk3Ku

— Foot Locker (@footlocker) September 25, 2014

The campaign came to a head on 1st October when Hardon was filmed copying the trick shots. Overall the impact of the campaign was about average, especially considering that Foot Locker has run campaigns that have received far more interaction and engagement.

There were 77 tweets published by Foot Locker that used the hashtag #horsewithhorden which in turn was used 1,900 times by Twitter users.

Soundcloud: The Berlin Wall of Sound
Titanium in the Titanium & Integrated category
Agency: Grey Germany

To commemorate the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, Soundcloud, which has its office located in what was the deadliest section of the wall, created a 15 minute long audio experience dubbed The Berlin Wall of Sound. Essentially the audio waves followed the height of the Berlin Wall so where there were guard towers the sound suddenly becomes louder and more intense.

On the Soundcloud website, the audio piece saw over 113,000 Listens. However, the content that announced this new audio piece on Facebook didn’t really register with fans that much. It was less engaging that most of Soundcloud’s other content, earning just 1,300 Likes and 79 Shares, which is dwarfed by other posts that it published like this Thanksgiving photo that earned it nearly 20,000 Likes.

Ad Council: Love Has No Labels
Bronze in the Titanium & Integrated category
Agency: R/GA

To create awareness about the bias tendencies in all of us, the Ad Council created this film of dancing, kissing and hugging skeletons. The aim was to drive home that people will make assumptions about the physical form of the skeletons before even seeing it and the shock factor highlights your own biases.

The YouTube video has seen over 52m views to date, while the video that was published by Upworthy has seen over 45m views. The post on Upworthy received over 1.44m shares, not quite the highest number of shares Unmetric has ever tracked (that record goes to AMC Theatres’ Minions Christmas message with over 3.1M shares) but certainly in the top 10.

Vodafone Turkey: Between Us
Shortlist in the Titanium & Integrated category
Agency: Y&R Team Red Istanbul

This campaign is a little tricky to review from a social media standpoint as it had no social media. This was done on purpose because the aim was to keep the domestic violence app a secret. To see how they executed this campaign, visit the Cannes Lions Archives.

Newcastle Brown Ale: Band of Brands
Gold in the Titanium & Integrated category
Agency: Droga5

Known for its irreverent and off the wall campaigns, who can forget Newcastle’s If We Made It Super Bowl ad from last year? For the 2015 Super Bowl, Newcastle came back with a similar story that they couldn’t afford a Super Bowl ad but wanted to go into partnership with other brands to secure a spot.

Leveraging the celebrity power of Aubrey Plaza in the lead up to the Super Bowl, Newcastle attracted over 4.6m views on the campaign videos it uploaded to YouTube. Although the campaign resonated fairly well on Facebook with over 4,000 Shares on its four Band of Brands posts, it was on Twitter where most of the action took place.

The hashtag #bandofbrands was used 20 times by Newcastle but a massive 4,773 times by users, although interestingly, the brand held off using the hashtag on the big day itself.

Nike: House of Mamba
Shortlist in the Titanium & Integrated category
Agency: AKQA

For a Chinese basketball reality TV show by Nike Rise and fronted by Kobe Bryant, a fully interactive basketball court was created using LED screens for the surface. This court was able to react to the movements of players and display anything from training drills to a regular basketball court.

The entire campaign happened in China on Tencent’s QQ network and had little involvement on social networks like Facebook and Twitter. However, just the explainer video from AKQA, the agency that executed the campaign, saw over 1.2m views which is an indication of how popular the campaign was in China.

Under Armour: I Will What I Want
Shortlist in the Titanium & Integrated category
Agency: Droga5

Under Armour had a problem. It was seen as the masculine sports apparel brand. To change that, Under Armour released a short, inspirational video featuring ballerina Misty Copeland. This was followed up by announcing supermodel Gisele Bündchen as the new brand ambassador – a unusual move considering she had nothing to do with sport. The reaction from Twitter was exactly what Under Armour expected and wanted as it showed Gisele not paying any heed to the haters.

On YouTube, the two ads featuring Copeland and Bündchen saw over 11m views combined. On Twitter, the brand first used the hashtag #iwillwhatiwant on July 30th and went on to use it another 10 times in the following months, however the hashtag was used over 2,500 times by other Twitter users.

Thirteen awesome campaigns, I’m sure you’ll agree. Now read on to get the social stats behind the other campaigns that made it to the Cannes Lions Titanium & Integrated category.

The Social Media Stats Behind The 37 Cannes Lions Titanium Winners: Part 2

Click here to read the second part. 12 more campaigns from the following brands:

• Smart Car: The Monster Smart Launch
• Honda Europe: The Other Side
• Converse: Made By You
• CBC: Abla Fahita
• Always: Like a Girl
• Comcast: Emily’s Oz
• Burger King: Proud Whopper
• Hong Kong: Face of Litter
• ZDK: Nazis Against Nazis
• No Somos Delito: Holograms For Freedom
• Volkswagen: Reduce Speed Dial
• Elan: Taste the Translation

The Social Media Stats Behind The 37 Cannes Lions Titanium Winners: Part 3

Click here to read the third part. The social media numbers behind the final 12 greatest campaigns of the last year, featuring the following brands:

• Pedigree: First Days Out
• Sport Club de Recife: Security Moms
• Salta Beer: Beer Tooth Implant
• Domino’s: Emoji Ordering
• Water For Africa: The Marathon Walker
• Radient: Radient Return
• UN World Food Programme: 805 Million Names
• Samsung: Safety Truck
• Jordan: Re2pect
• Action For Gun Sense: Groceries Not Guns
• Prevent Gun Violence: Gun Shop
• Nike: Risk Everything