Marketing and comms agency VMLY&R won the top prize across the two major healthcare awards at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity Monday night for its work with Dell, Intel and Rolls-Royce as well as Maxx Flash mosquito repellent coil.
Yes, you read that correctly: Following on from last year when a non-pharma company took the Grand Prix in Pharma, we have the same again this year. This time, the winning campaign was created on behalf of Dell Technologies and Intel in partnership with Rolls-Royce and the MND Association.
The hard-hitting campaign from VMLY&R New York, called "I Will Always Be Me," focuses on motor neuron disease (MND)—specifically on the disease’s cruel way of stealing patients’ voices. Tech giants Dell and Intel and luxury car maker Rolls-Royce teamed up to engineer a “voice bank” that can create a digital copy of a patient’s voice so they can still sound like themselves even after losing their ability to speak normally.
This allows a newly diagnosed patient to read text from a short book into the digital voice bank and, in the future, use it as a voice machine. To launch the project, VMLY&R also created a documentary showing a group of people with MND and their families as they experience this for the first time.
One lone drugmaker captured gold in the Pharma category, as Horizon Therapeutics took that prize for its Eyedar app for the blind. Losing out on golds and the Grand Prix were some big names, including Abbott, AstraZeneca, Evofem, Novartis and Pfizer.
It was something of a déja vu: Wearable company Woojer won the creativity festival's top prize in the Pharma category last year for "Sick Beats," its music experience and treatment vest for people with cystic fibrosis. But even then, pharmas managed a strong showing, with Roche, Pfizer and Teva all scoring Gold Lions.
That obviously wasn't repeated in 2022. Nor did drugmakers score in the Health & Wellness division, where VMLY&R took its second Grand Prix. This award-winning work, “The Killer Pack” for Maxx Flash, was done in partnership with the Indian city of Mumba and through VMLY&R India.
The Pack is a new piece of biodegradable packaging that kills mosquito larvae when disposed of in garbage dumps and stagnant water, helping fight life-threatening diseases like dengue and malaria in India.
Indians often use mosquito repellent coils to fight mosquitoes inside the home, but the real problem tends to lie outside: Authorities found that garbage collection points were acting as breeding grounds for mosquitoes carrying these diseases. So, Maxx Flash, a mosquito repellent brand, introduced The Killer Pack to attack outside and help stop the spread of malaria.
VMLY&R's wins were a first for the marketing firm and WPP subsidiary. “We are so happy and humbled to kick off the week with two bangs and collect our first Grand Prix in these important categories,” Debbi Vandeven, global chief creative officer at VMLY&R, told Fierce Pharma Marketing.
There were no pharma winners in the Health & Wellness category; the majority of Gold Lions went to technology projects. They included wins for Staybl and agency Havas, for an app for Parkinson’s patients that can help tamp down tremors, and Project Convey from Cox, a video chat prototype designed to help people on the autism spectrum better identify nonverbal social cues.
The Motor Neurone Disease Association of New Zealand also picked up a winner, the second for that disease this year, for its work with “David’s Unusables,” which shows how David, diagnosed with MND, sheds the things he will no longer need on an eBay-type site as his disease progresses, sharing stories about those items along the way.
A lot of Big Pharma names lost out in this division, too, including GSK and its speech therapist app, Johnson & Johnson’s menstrual poverty campaign and Pfizer's China healthcare campaign "Health Constellation."
And Area 23 took healthcare ad network of the year, while FCB Health took the top gong for ad agency of the year.
The awards were presented live Monday as the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity returned in person after a pandemic-forced two-year hiatus, with 2020 canceled outright and 2021 a fully virtual affair.
The pharma division's short list amounted to 31 entries, down from 48 in 2021, when the judging covered entries for the 2020 and 2021 contests.
The Health & Wellness category, meanwhile, drew from a wide swath of consumer brand companies and saw 116 shortlisted, slightly down on the 127 from last year.
But with an in-person return came in-person problems. There was a strange moment at the start of the awards show when a man professing to be a former Lions winner dramatically gave back his award amid a one-man demonstration against ads for fossil fuels. He was later taken out by security.
There was a total of 25,464 entries from 87 countries competing across the Cannes Lions this year, which is down on the total 29,074 creative pieces of work entered last year, itself a drop from 30,953 in 2019.