Newsletter
The Cannes Lions International Creativity Festival is, as the name implies, a haven for a very wide variety of creative pursuits. Naturally, with the creativity involved in business pursuits like advertising, the tech and enterprise worlds have a heavy presence at the festival each year. This year was certainly no exception, seeing Samsung blowing everybody away with a good few advertising campaigns that took more than a fair dose of creativity to see to completion. That said, it should surprise quite few people that Samsung has taken home the gold this year in marketing, winning the coveted and industry-recognized Creative Marketer of the Year award at Cannes Lions 2016, one of the most prominent awards in the marketing industry.
At the 63rd annual occurrence of the Cannes Lions festival, Samsung was recognized for, among other things, 11 different ad campaigns, each having a unique focus, direction, demographic and core message. Many of the campaigns, in typical Samsung fashion, focused on humanitarian efforts and appeals to humanity and empathy, tugging on the heartstrings, so to speak. Two such campaigns were directly focused on helping to improve the human condition. brainBAND, a head wearable meant to prevent concussions in sports and other more hardcore applications, netted six separate awards, including the Gold Award in New Uses of Technology, a highly prized symbol of potent innovation in the industry. Another campaign, Voices of Life, sought to unite infants not incubating in the womb with their mothers by letting the babies hear heartbeats, breathing, their mother’s voice and other things that womb babies typically get. Voices of Life earned Samsung the Silver Award in Online Video. They also showed off Blind Cap, a swimming cap for the blind that alerts a swimmer as they near the end of a lane or any other obstacle in the water, keeping the swimmer from having to time themselves or slow down and allowing them to focus on their craft. This campaign got Samsung the Activation by Proxy category’s gold award.
Samsung initiatives both in and out of the advertising world drummed up tons of positive reputation for the company and earned them more than their fair share of recognition at this year’s Cannes Lions. Samsung’s Executive VP of Global Marketing, Younghee Lee, was on hand to accept the award, and make a speech both giving fair credit to all Samsung employees company-wide, and telling everybody in no uncertain terms that Samsung is far from through with innovating in marketing, and will continue to manage their brand and place in the public eye with the same heart and open mindedness that won them this year’s awards.