A Cannes Lions Roundup: Healthcare Marketing Winners
The Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity is arguably the advertising industry’s most prestigious—and certainly the most glamorous—awards ceremony, with the world’s biggest brands vying for The Grand Prix, the festival’s equivalent of the Palm D’Or. This year, the 64th festival offered a new category—Health and Wellness Tech—which focused on innovative healthcare marketing strategies that took advantage of changes that Big Data, artificial intelligence, and IOT are bringing to healthcare.
2017’s biggest winners were:
Meet Graham: Taking Interactive Display to the Next Level
Clemenger BBDO Melbourne won The Grand Prix in the Health and Wellness and Cyber Categories, along with a gold Lion, 3 silvers, and a bronze for “Meet Graham” campaign, a public health campaign for the Australian Transport Accident Commission. The “Graham” in question is a life-sized sculpture which incorporated augmented reality technology into an on-site interactive display that explained the physiological vulnerabilities of the human body. Viewers could also experience real-time interaction with Graham online using Google’s Tango app. The campaign was immensely popular, with its website gaining 9 million page views in 8 days—without any paid media spend, according to the campaign’s web development agency.
What Worked:
Meet Graham is a campaign which, like many public health ads, employs a liberal dose of shock. Graham is malformed, and grotesquely so, but it doesn’t play as sensationalistic. The originality of the display’s form—a life-sized character that can be interacted with in-person and online and an almost irresistible call-to-action (a chance to peek inside the anatomy of a “monster” using a mobile device)–make its stomach-churning hyper-realism logical, not sophomoric. Meet Graham built its appeal around a mobile-friendly bid for engagement: gamifying its messaging (the results of unsafe driving are horrific) through a macabre (and addicting) take on the virtual tour.
What to Adopt:
Take a fresh look at interactive digital-out-of-home (DOOH) display technology. As shown by the “Meet Graham” campaign, the landscape has advanced well beyond the awkward information kiosks of the early 2000’s: DOOH is now the second fastest growing ad format globally after mobile. Remote interaction with DOOH displays can take numerous forms in healthcare marketing, ranging from 360 virtual tours to offsite telemedicine hubs that allow clients to book appointments and interact with care providers at convenient locations.
Sculptor Patricia Piccinini at a press conference discussing her interactive display design.
Not Available in Your Country: Using AI-Driven Content to Inspire Engagement
The partnership between La Caixa Bank and Unicef to fight childhood pneumonia has existed since 2015, but last year The Young Lions—an award for creatives under 30—presented the cause as a strategy-building challenge to entrants in the Health category. As a result, in 2017 several tech conglomerates came on board to support an ingenious campaign by Giulia Marchi, Art Director and Giovanni Santoni, Art Director at WPP’s Sudler International Milan which uses the power of AI to illustrate campaign messaging. On November 12, simultaneously, Amazon, Netflix, and the BBC will make their content unavailable without warning for 24 hours to illustrate how a minor inconvenience pales in comparison to the lack of life-saving medication in certain nations.
When viewers attempt to view content, a targeted message will present a series of activities required to unlock content.
What Worked:
While the campaign has yet to go live, Jury President Andy Hood, Head of Emerging Technologies, AKQA, stated that the Grand Prix winner was chosen because of its ability to bridge the gap between technology and creativity, while expanding the limits of both. “It’s not just an award”, said Hood at a press briefing, “it’s a statement of how we want the winning work to be and how technology can have a direct impact on people’s lives.”
Rather than focus on traditional storytelling, Marchi and Santoni evaded the “content blindness ” pitfall altogether by building a campaign that capitalizes on the deep connection consumers have to their favorite content sites. In delivering messaging that packs an emotional wallop at a point when consumers would be frustrated, and perhaps even angry over an inconvenience, the campaign underscores the “need ” for outrage at a perceived social injustice in an unforgettable way.
Not Available in Your Country will leverage the audience-targeting and machine-learning algorithms employed by the BBC, Amazon, and Netflix to display campaign messaging that is tailored, based on content interactivity, to reach an estimated 40% of Netflix users, 20% of BBC users, and 10% of Amazon users.
What to Adopt
According to recent research, the bulk of branded content is quickly forgotten, or overlooked altogether by consumers, who seek originality, immediate relevance, and tend to be put off by sales-oriented copy. How to remain memorable? Take advantage of your audience’s existing content consumption patterns and offer them more of what they love as a way to inspire interactivity with your own media offerings. That might include developing a partnership with one of their favorite content sites to unlock exclusive offers for your audience or inviting consumers to share their own relevant social media content on your site in order to access educational products or services.
While the Cannes Lions Festival celebrates the creativity of some of the world’s most influential brand marketers, their innovative methods of using technology to inspire engagement can be adopted by healthcare organizations of any size.
Bottom Line
We’re here to help you develop a powerful brand story. We’ll use the most relevant technologies to bring your message to the right audience at the right time, and we’ll help you keep them engaged over time. Reach out today for a free consultation.