HBO promo picks up second Cannes Grand Prix award
CANNES, France -- A voyeuristic HBO promotional video shown on the side of a New York City building won the best-of-show Grand Prix for outdoor advertising on Tuesday at the ad industry's top global creative competition, the Cannes Lions festival.
It was the second Grand Prix in two days for the Voyeur Project: On Monday, the overall campaign was named best sales promotion. It also won a Gold Lion and a Silver Lion in the promotion category. And it won a bronze Lion Tuesday in the media strategy competition. There may be more prizes to come: The online component, for example, is entered for the Cyber Lion awards to be announced today at the week-long festival.
The massive display was projected onto a brick building in Lower Manhattan for two weeks. The four-minute, technically complex, multiple-viewpoint video made it seem that the wall of the building had been cut away, allowing viewers to peer into eight apartments and spy on the lives of the residents. The video kicked off a campaign with ongoing mobile, online and TV-on-demand elements.
The campaign extends the stories — and sense of voyeurism — across other advertising media. The idea, HBO says, is to get the viewer to ask the question: "Do You Like To Watch?" (If they do, of course, they should subscribe to HBO.)
The display "is almost redefining the category," says Prasoon Joshi, head of the outdoor judges and executive chairman at McCann Worldgroup India. "If there was no outdoor, people would not have gone to the Web. It's defined by outdoor and draws people in and sends them off into other mediums. It was so cleverly done."
Meanwhile, BBDO New York won the USA's only gold Lion in outdoor with displays on building walls to promote the BBC World News service. Scenes from events, such as combat, were re-created as giant line drawings with coaxial TV cable. The message with them: "Connect with the world. BBC World."
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