Notes from Underground (in the Palais basement at Cannes Lions)

I was grateful to spend the week of Cannes Lions in the basement of the Palais, giving tours of the work to delegates. If you have a low tolerance for crowds and skin that burns faster than thinly sliced garlic, there’s really no better way to experience the International Festival of Creativity.

Roaming the exhibition of shortlisted campaigns is also great for spotting creative trends, and beyond the obvious ones — AI, purpose, inclusivity etc — I noticed this year a burgeoning fashion for something that I’ve dubbed ‘Mnemonic Possession’. (There may already be a term for this tactic, and I’ll be glad to learn it, but until then, I’m claiming naming rights.)

Mnemonic Possession is when brands try to turn a common object or gesture into a cue to think about their products or services. These triggers act a lot like brand associations except that they’re less concerned with consumption occasions and more focused on hijacking other people’s media, so they tend to be a bit more guerilla in their execution.

Tide’s 2018 Super Bowl spot, It’s a Tide Ad — where the brand claimed every TV advert is an ad for its detergent because they all show people wearing clean clothes — is the Platonic ideal of Mnemonic Possession, and the success of that campaign probably has something to do with the tactic’s current popularity. 

Without trying very hard, I found at least four examples of Mnemonic Possession among the winners at Cannes Lions this year.

First, there was Mercado Livre’s Handshake Hunt, where the retailer cut a deal with a Brazilian TV channel so that on Black Friday, QR codes unlocking discounts would appear on screen whenever people shook hands in movies or shows — because Mercado Livre’s logo is a handshake.

Oreo Calls, meanwhile, invited people watching the March Madness basketball tournament to point their phones at their TV screens every time a referee appeared, to access discounts on its products at Walmart — because, Oreo says, the officials’ uniforms resemble its black and white cookies.

In French-speaking Canada, Budweiser changed its name on cans and in ads to ‘Buuuuud’, which sounds a lot like what commentators say when a goal is scored in a hockey match (‘Buuuuut’), in order to improve its sales among fans of the Montreal Canadiens, a team owned by rival brewer Molson.

And finally, at this year’s Super Bowl, DoorDash promised to give the winner of its contest something from every brand that advertised during the big game, as a way to announce that it now delivered not just food but everything — and to make sure that people were thinking about DoorDash when watching other brands’ ads.

Of course, there really is no substitute for buying ads in places where potential customers are likely to see them. But if it’s done well, Mnemonic Possession can be an effective way to extend the reach and longevity of a campaign. It can be a useful plan B, if you don’t have the money or opportunity to buy the media you’d like, or even a good addition to your plan A, if you just want your creative to work as hard as possible.

And if you found this morsel of creative analysis interesting, you can learn more about the major themes from this year’s International Festival of Creativity by booking a Cannes Lions Deconstructed briefing for you and your team.

In fact, you'll probably still enjoy Cannes Lions Deconstructed, even if you found my thoughts about Mnemonic Possession a bit half-baked. The editors and analysts who wrote this year's briefing didn’t think it was good enough to include in their precious list of trends, either — so you’ll have that in common.

James Swift, insight editor

Campaign of the Week /

As an official sponsor of the All Blacks, a Rugby World Cup is manna from heaven — that is of course if you happen to be an official sponsor of the event too. Alas, Uber Eats could boast of the former, but not the latter.

Undeterred, the delivery brand turned rugby players’ post-match interview clichés into time-sensitive discount codes. To redeem the codes and get a discount on their next order, people had to decode the clues dropped on Uber Eats’ social media and in digital OOH ads. For example, when several rugby players said they were ‘really proud of the boys’, Uber Eats posted the five-word phrase on its Instagram page, with four of the words redacted out for people to fill in the rest.

The tournament-long campaign launched on the first All Blacks game on 16 September 2023, and was created by Special Sydney and Special Aukland, According to the agency, the Cliché Codes campaign reached 2.3 million out of 5 million New Zealanders and gathered 5 million total impressions. Throughout the tournament, 84,510 codes were redeemed, equivalent to NZ$1.7m ($1.05m) worth of discounts. Read our full analysis here. Contagious.

Attend this /

Speakers from Dove, McCann and VML will be on stage at our Cannes Lions Deconstructed event next week, to discuss the big winners from this year's International Festival of Creativity.

Contagious speakers will also be there to take you through two of the trends from our Cannes Deconstructed briefing.

So, join us from 5:30pm-7:45pm on 9 July at VML's offices in London, for an evening of insight and inspiration surrounded by fellow forward thinkers who value commercial creativity. Get your tickets here. Contagious.

Toys R Us plays with AI advertising

Toys R Us has become one of the first major brands to put out a video ad that was made almost entirely by generative AI.

The toy retailer completed ‘80%-85%’ of the one-minute spot using text-to-video tool Sora, according to the Wall Street Journal, before letting an agency finish it off.

We’ve emailed Toys R Us to find out if the ad will be broadcast on any paid-media channels but suspect that we know the answer to that question already.

Reactions to the ad have run the gamut from ‘awful’ to ‘aren’t they brave for trying’, which means people largely agree about the quality of the film but disagree on whether or not it matters that it’s awful.

While there is something to be said for brands pioneering new technologies and media, the cold hard fact is that consumers don’t really care whether or not an ad pushes boundaries. It either sells or it doesn’t. So in that regard, the Toys R Us spot looks like a failure. It’s inconsistent and ropey looking, and the first thing we thought when we saw it is that it makes the brand look cheap.

But the ad has earned a lot of press coverage — which was surely the point of the exercise — and many people were probably unaware that Toys R Us was still in business after filing for bankruptcy in 2017. So maybe the brand is quite content to look cheap — it’s still an awareness, of sorts. YouTube.