Cannes Contenders: M&C Saatchi/Tricky Jigsaw
How will Australia perform at Cannes this year? In the lead up to the Festival, Campaign Brief will be showcasing the work we hope will impress the judges…
M&C Saatchi
‘Cogs’ is a film that helped Australian charity AIME launch globally. It tells the story of an unfair machine world, where people’s lives are predetermined by which side of the tracks they’re on. It’s only by working against this machine and helping those less fortunate that things start to change. This is what AIME is all about–creating a fairer world through the sharing of education.
M&C Saatchi
Idea: Australians are obsessed with sport. And this obsession is a family thing. The team your Dad supported is the one you go for. It’s tradition. And that means most Aussies watch AFL or Rugby.They know about football. They even watch the big games. They just don’t have a team to go for. So getting them to buy a English Premier League TV package from Optus Sport would be, well, challenging to say the least. But as 78% of Australians can be traced back genetically to the United Kingdom, the home of the EPL, maybe we could give them a more historic reason. Introducing Fancestry. Fancestry scans the databases of Ancestry.com to find the team your ancestors went for before they got on the boats for Australia. The team you were born to support.
Execution: Posters, EDMs and POS encouraged Aussies to visit the Fancestry site. All we needed was a surname. The Fancestry algorithm searched tens of millions of Ancestry records. We scoured births, deaths, military records and every census from the 1800s. And precise mapping gave you the team you never knew you supported. Along with their history, colours, famous players and, of course, a free trial to watch them play on Optus Sport. 63% of website visitors did just that. And a Pay TV network for a sport played in the middle of the night gained 40,000 new subscribers.
Relevance: For many years, the English Premier League had a small footprint in Australia. After all, the majority of games were played when Australians were asleep. And as most Australians didn’t have a team, the cable TV channel Foxtel just showed the showcase games. When Optus, Australia’s second largest telecommunication network, bought the rights to the EPL they planned to show every minute of every game. Traditional above the line activity could only do so much. It could raise awareness and create buzz. But it needed a more innovative solution to give Australians a reason to watch.
Innovation: Ancestry.com were thrilled to take part in this unique project. After all, millions of people used them to find their distant relatives – not a football team. It was an exciting use of their technology and a way for both companies to seamlessly work together. The chance to discover the team your ancestors went for was intriguing and exciting. It gave Australians an instant connection to a game they knew little about but wanted a reason to watch.
Tricky Jigsaw, M&C Saatchi
Firefighters are our best defence against bushfires in Australia, and help the country battle the 50,000 fires it suffers each year. They are extremely difficult to stop but speed and information are firefighters’ best weapon in managing their destruction. And that’s exactly what NRMA Fireblanket was built to do: detect early and communicate instantly. In our research into bushfires, we discovered that sight was the most common method of detecting fires. This is fine when fires are large and near, but many bushfires start off small, slow and at night. The truth is you can smell smoke before you see a fire, especially at night. NRMA Fireblanket was developed as an always-on bushfire monitoring and detection network. It uses calibrated dust particle sensor nodes (that talk to one-another) to smell, pinpoint, track but also predict where bushfires will spread.