Ben Lilley Live From Vegas: Some Surprising LIA Hacks
Ben Lilley, Creative Chairman of HERO + McCANN, represented Australia on the LIA Integration and Direct jury. Here he reports on his time in Vegas exclusively for Campaign Brief.
Are the best creatives actually clandestine hackers? And the best creative a covert culture hack? I think so.
The most awesome work we’ve seen – and awarded – this week hacked culture in completely unexpected ways. Then turned those hacks into equally surprising creative campaigns. These are the kind of ideas that media commentators might call disrupting the status quo. Or creativity at the speed of culture. Or radical upstream innovative ideations. You get the idea. I just call them hacks. And this week we’ve seen some incredible hacks of:
• Product names (many, many product name hacks)
• Packaging
• Pubs
• Pets
• Pet collars
• Competitors
• AI (less than you’d expect)
• Water
• Bottles
• The environment
• Chickens (and eggs)
• Rice
• Songs
• Insects
• Time (seriously – and it worked)
• Pregnancy tests (more than one)
• Lawn-mowers
• Land mines
• Daytime driving
• Nighttime driving
• The law and legislation (many of these)
• Rules and regulations (like media regulation)
• Sports
• Politics
• Language
• Social media platforms
• Excel spreadsheets
• Musicals (more than one musical in fact)
• Crates (as in, bottle crates)
• Games (many, many, many gaming hacks)
• Cookies
And these are just the better ones. Every one of these hacks was a brilliant idea, often developed in collaboration other brands; or subject-matter experts; scientists; universities; media; technologies. One product innovation was a ‘world-first brand collaboration’ with itself, which was pretty funny.
In a lot of cases though, many of these brilliant ideas were just that – brilliant ideas. And that’s it. At a creative award show though, we’re judging not just the idea, but also the craft and execution. And the perfect alchemy of the whole package. And of course the award category relevance. And most often (although not always) the results and effectiveness. So a good idea alone is not enough. It must be excellent in every way, especially creatively (duh).
So this year’s LIA hack is: be a hacker and you’re already half-way way there. But then apply the best possible creative craft, tools and talents to your hack. If it’s an emotive idea and execution, all the better. Creative that gets the feels, gets the results. And bonus points if it’s funny – the funnier the campaign, the better the odds.
Then set it free into the wild. Make sure it works and collate the proof (pro tip: ‘impressions’ and ‘positive sentiments’ alone are not proof enough. Data is your friend.) Then gather all that goodness together into an equally excellent case film that shows the culture-bending power of your creative hack (pro tip #2: craft that case film just as meticulously as the campaign, if not better.) Finally, tailor your case film for each award category (and extra pro tip: this doesn’t have to be an excessive amount of extra work, sometimes just a tweak is all that’s required from category to category to make sure the work ticks the eligibility criteria for each one.)
Get all that right and congratulations, you’ve hacked the system! You’ve achieved a level of world-class creativity that’s elevated customers, culture and commercial outcomes alike. And here, creative colleague, is your London International Award. Oh and speaking of, our awarded work from the Integration & Direct jury obviously did all of this magnificently, especially our two Grand LIA’s which also (bonus points) both made us laugh when we watched the case films. You can see them both below. And hopefully you’ll notice all of these hacks in perfect measure as you watch each one.
Grand LIA Integration
CeraVe Skincare “Michael CeraVe“
Grand LIA Direct
Skinny Mobile “Skinny Phone It In“