The Social Media Stats Behind The 37 Cannes Lions Titanium Winners: Part 3
Peter Claridge
July 1, 2015 • 8 min read
Updated on May 2, 2017
This is the third and final piece in our three part blog series that looks at the social media stats behind the winning campaigns in the Cannes Lions Titanium & Integrated category – often thought of as the pinnacle category to win by agencies.
All of these campaigns relied on social media to varying degrees to spread their message. The submission videos by the agencies for each campaign also had one thing in common: beyond media mentions and earned media value, they all mentioned how many social interactions they received. Using Unmetric, we were able to delve deeper in to the campaign and surface metrics and stats not available to the judges at Cannes Lions.
You are reading Part 3 in a three part series. You can view Part 1 here and Part 2 here. That said, for all you soccer fans, I saved the best ’till last. You’ll see what I mean when you reach the end of this article.
Pedigree: First Days Out
Shortlist in the Titanium & Integrated category
Agency: ALMAPBBDO
Convicts who are freed from jail and out on parole can face a tough time adjusting to their new found life. Society can ostracize them, survival skills learned in prison may limit their ability to build relationships. It can be quite a lonely experience. Pedigree wanted to give former prisoners a second chance by teaming them up with dogs that had been abandoned who were also deserving of a second chance. The bond that forms between the two helps transform both their lives.
The video uploaded on YouTube generated more than 3.2M Views. The agency behind the campaign is claiming that the video saw over 6M Views on Facebook along with 142,000 Likes and 78,000 Shares. However the only post on Pedigree’s Brazilian Facebook page shows just 16.5K Views and 1,000 Shares so it’s not clear where the agency is getting its numbers from.
Sport Club de Recife: Security Moms
Shortlist in the Titanium & Integrated category
Agency: Ogilvy Brasil
Brazilian soccer team, Recife had a problem with fan violence during key derby games. In 2014 there were 18 incidents during the game and in 2013 there were 14. To try to ensure a more peaceful match in 2015, Recife enlisted the mothers of fans to help keep order. The idea was that by seeing their own mothers trying to keep the peace, the fans would be less inclined towards violence. The campaign worked.
The campaign received worldwide media attention and could well serve as a template for other soccer clubs facing their own fan violence problems.
Salta Beer: Beer Tooth Implant
Gold in the Titanium & Integrated category
Agency: Ogilvy & Mather Argentina
Rugby players in Argentina give their blood, sweat, tears and often, their teeth, during the physical matches. To celebrate this commitment to their sport, Salta Beer, which has a long standing association with the game of Rugby in Argentina, contracted a dentist to create a new tooth that would double up as a bottle opener.
The campaign generated over 700,000 Views (although this was across videos that were uploaded on multipe channels) and an estimated 200,000 shares on Facebook. On the official Salta Beer page, the first post about the ad only registered 397 Shares and 529 Likes so it’s not very clear which post generated all those shares.
ZDK: Nazis Against Nazis
Shortlist in the Titanium & Integrated category
Agency: Grabarz & Partner, GGH Lowe
Every year neo-Nazis descend upon the small German town of Wunsiedel, causing businesses to shut down and residents to hide away in their homes. The Nazis Against Nazis campaign sought to turn the tables by turning the marching neo-Nazis into a protest march against…neo-Nazis. For every metre the neo-Nazis marched, businesses and residents donated €10. Signs were posted at regular intervals to let the neo-Nazis know how much money they had raised against their movement.
The campaign received worldwide attention and the English and German language videos saw 1.4M and 1.5M views respectively.
Water For Africa: The Marathon Walker
Shortlist in the Titanium & Integrated category
Agency: Ogilvy Paris
In many African countries, women have to walk great distances just to get clean water for their families. Water For Africa, a charity working to bring borewells to remove villages in countries like Gambia, brought one lady to the Paris Marathon, where she walked the 26 miles (42KM) with 20 liters of water on her head. She carried a message board which read “In Africa, women walk this distance everyday to bring clean water”.
The impact of the campaign went beyond all expectations with every major media outlet talking more about the lady carrying the water can than the marathon itself. The cause raised more money than they had hoped for.
Radient: Radient Return
Shortlist in the Titanium & Integrated category
Agency: DDB Group Melbourne
Australian laundry detergent brand, Radient, was facing an existential crisis. Its market share had slipped to the point where it was about to be delisted from various supermarkets, even though it worked as well as other laundry brands. The brand needed one last ditch effort to win back consumers to stop it disappearing from the shelves forever. The campaign highlighted how the detergent was so good, you could buy new clothes, get them completed caked in dirt, wash them with Radient and return them to the same store for a full refund – because they still looked like new. The result was that Radient went from almost delisted to the number one detergent in Australia.
Shortlist in the Titanium & Integrated category
Agency: Forsman & Bodenfors
With civil war and climate change displacing hundreds of millions of people, poverty and hunger is rife. The UN World Food Programme estimates that there are around 805 Million people that go hungry every single day. To raise awareness about this, the organization roped in Swedish soccer star, Zlatan Ibravimovich. Zlatan had 15 temporary tattoos added to his body with the plan to take off his shirt should he score. Fortunately he did and the resultant media coverage of Zlatan completely covered in tattoos saw the media pick up the story as was hoped. For his efforts, Zlatan picked up a yellow card for the gesture because removing your shirt during the game is an offense in soccer.
There are 805 million hungry people in the world today. That means 1 in 9 people do not get enough food to be healthy…
Posted by World Food Programme on Sunday, February 15, 2015
The World Food Programme shared the campaign multiple times across its social media channel. The Facebook post above generated 23,000 Shares and the video was viewed over 1.5M times. The same video that was uploaded to YouTube saw more than 5.4M views and 55,000 people thumbed it up. The WFP estimates that the campaign generated 4.4M social impressions and reached around 877M people.
Samsung: Safety Truck
Titanium in the Titanium & Integrated category
Agency: Leo Burnett Argentina
Due to the lack of roads with more than two lanes in Argentina, one person dies every hour on the road on average, with many of the deaths being caused by overtaking and hitting the oncoming traffic. To do its part to try and save lives, Samsung Argentina rigged up a camera on its lorries and LCD screens on the back of the trucks. People travelling behind the lorry could see what was ahead and make a better decision about choosing whether to overtake. Over 1.4M KM have been travelled to date by Samsung’s lorries where there were 24,000 vehicles overtaking them and not a single traffic incident has occured.
Una idea que podría revolucionar la seguridad vial y contribuir a salvar vidas, ¿qué te parece?
Posted by Samsung Argentina on Friday, June 12, 2015
The post on Samsung Argentina’s Facebook page has seen nearly 20,000 people sharing it and 38,000 people Liking it. The video has generated over 350,000 Views on Facebook, but the same video has been uploaded to YouTube multiple times and one of those uploads has seen twice the number of views. The campaign didn’t resonate quite so much on Twitter where the tweet was retweeted just eight times.
Jordan: Re2pect
Grand Prix in the Titanium & Integrated category
Agency: Wieden+Kennedy
In the summer of 2014, one of the most respected baseball players the New York Yankees had ever had, Derek Jeter, was going to play his last match and retire from the sport forever. To commerate this big moment in baseball history, Jordan created the Re2pect campaign, the ‘2’ being a nod to Jeter’s number 2 jersey that he has worn. Jordan got baseball fans in New York and fans of other teams to tip their cap to Jeter as a mark of respect to the player.
The campaign generated over 9.1M Views on YouTube and 47,000 people thumbed up the video. The video was seven times more popular than any other video that Jordan had ever uploaded to its YouTube Channel. On Twitter, 55,000 people used the hashtag when mentioning Jordan’s @jumpman23 handle and the brand tracked over 90,000 hashtag usages in total making it one of the most popular brand hashtags of the year.
Action For Gun Sense: Groceries Not Guns
Silver in the Titanium & Integrated category
Agency: Grey Canada
To highlight the unusual right to entry policies at Kroger stores, Mom’s Demand Action launched a campaign on social, TV and radio. In the two months after the launch of the campaign, the hashtag #groceriesnotguns was used over 55,000 times by users on Twitter.
Prevent Gun Violence: Gun Shop
Shortlist in the Titanium & Integrated category
Agency: Grey New York
Many people in America believe that owning a gun will help protect them but research suggests otherwise with numerous accidents being reported every single year. To highlight the dangers of gun ownership, States United to Prevent Gun Violence opened a pop-up gun shop in New York and invited first time gun buyers to come inside. Secret cameras recorded potential customers as they learned about the guns they wanted to buy, each of which had a deadly history from a 5 year old child shooting his baby brother to the assault rifle used at Sandy Hook. The campaign didn’t just run in New York, there was an online shop as well where users could take a survey to find out what kind of gun would be most suitable for them and were once again told the history behind the gun they were being recommended.
The video above saw nearly 4.2M views and the campaign as a whole saw a 1,250% increase in signatures on the gun control petition.
Nike: Risk Everything
Shortlist in the Titanium & Integrated category
Agency: Wieden+Kennedy
With its arch-rival, Adidas, being the official sponsor of the World Cup, Nike had to produce something quite special to direct the attention to itself without being able to reference anything about the tournament. The #RiskEverything campaign was born out of this and two epic films were created. The first was a live action film featuring some of the biggest soccer stars in the world including Ronaldo, Neymar, Rooney, David Luiz, Ibravinovich, Pique and even a cameo from Italian great, Pirlo. The second film was an animated epic with Brazian legend Ronaldo bringing together an all-star team to take on the clone players.
The social media stats behind this campaign completely boggle the mind. It sets a new standard when it comes to an integrated campaign and the reach must have been off the charts compared to every campaign before it.
Frankly, both films are so good that I couldn’t publish this blog post without embedding both videos, so here’s the animated Last Game video which saw over 85M Views on YouTube alone.
And then there was the Winner Stays video, which would be familiar to anyone that played a sport as a kid (or teenager in this case). This video saw over 117M Views on YouTube making it one of the most popular brand videos of all time.
On Twitter, Nike Football pushed the #RiskEverything hashtag constantly for four whole months starting on April 1st, 2014. The handle used the hashtag over 600 times, but that was nothing compared to the number of times it was used by the Twitter community. The hashtag ended up being used over 150,000 times, making it one of the most used hashtags by a brand ever.
That’s it from the Cannes Lions. Join us again next year as we review the next batch of incredible campaigns from agencies around the world. And remember, if you want your campaign to be featured in this list next year, just leverage a major sporting event that you are not sponsoring.
