AN INFLUENCER-driven conspiracy theory that actor Michael Cera was the secret brains behind moisturising lotion CeraVe turned out to be a Super Bowl campaign — and now it’s a Grand Prix winner at Cannes Lions.
Ogilvy PR, New York took the top prize in the Social & Influencer category for the ‘CeraVe’ campaign, which notched up 32 billion earned impressions — not to mention the brand’s biggest week of sales ever.
“It can point to a world where we beautifully blur the lines of advertising and culture and influencer and social,” Jury President Amy Ferguson, from Special U.S., said.
“It was wildly ambitious and loveably absurd. Culture grabbed onto it. It was a complicated masterclass in multi-channel, and it did a ton for the business.”
Ferguson added that the Jury’s key task was “trying to find ideas whose centre of gravity was inherently tied to social or to use of influencers”, rather than simply being wider campaigns that used these channels.
“Social is everything, and everything is social. This category is getting so ubiquitous with the work. That is a challenge moving forward,” Ferguson said.
‘CeraVe’ also took a Gold Lion in the category, while Saatchi & Saatchi, New York’s ‘Gonna Need More Tide’ campaign for Tide bagged a pair of Gold Lions.
Other Golds were awarded to work from the US (2), France, Canada, Japan and — a Lions first — Kazakhstan.
“I was particularly excited about this category because it’s so modern. This space of social and influencer is changing literally all the time,” Ferguson said.
“Adapting to that is a challenge that we can meet with creativity. The shape of the work that we saw [while judging] was so varied and so vast.”
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