Tim Devine, Global Chief Invention Officer, AKQA: My Top 3 @ Cannes
Tim Devine, Global Chief Invention Officer, AKQA, represented Australia on the Cannes Digital Craft Lions jury.
Devine, along with most of the other Australian and New Zealand jurors, presents his top 3 favourite campaigns from the Digital Craft Lions competition, exclusively for CB…
Autism Society ‘Language of Bedwetting’ (Gold Lion Winner)
Creative Agency: McCann New York
This is a simple piece of work that didn’t exist before, and I think it’s meaningful and great for that reason alone. There’s something really special about work that feels so obvious once it’s been made, the kind of thing that should have been there from the start. What I really loved is the connection it creates between people with non-verbal autism and the people who love and care for them. It makes communication easier, takes away shame, and brings in collaboration and care. It’s beautiful.
Hyundai ‘Forests Without Names’ (Shortlist)
Creative Agency: BBDO New York
I really liked the idea of this one. It maps and names the world’s sea forests, the underwater kelp and seaweed ecosystems that have gone unnamed and therefore unprotected, on the principle that what isn’t named is hard to care about and harder to protect. Two things stood out. The craft is in the restraint, using data and AI to build something genuinely useful rather than just to tell a story about it. And it activates local communities around the forests on their own doorsteps, consulting them on the names themselves, which turns a global idea into something locally owned. Work that mobilises people around a local cause is worthy almost by definition. I’ll be honest about where I landed in the room: I struggled to find a precedent for naming itself being a significant change, and that made it hard to argue the impact was already real. But my hunch is it will matter in time, and the act of giving something an identity so it can enter the systems that protect it, is a quietly radical move.
BCP ‘SOS POS’ (Gold Lion Winner)
Creative Agency: Circus Grey, Lima
I thought this one was great. In Peru more than 4,000 phones are stolen every day, and accounts are drained within minutes. The problem is brutally simple: how do you call your bank to block your account when the thing that’s been stolen is your phone? My first instinct was that the answer would be to make the app more secure, but the more I sat with it the more I realised the problem runs deeper than that, and that phones are often stolen while they’re unlocked, which leaves the apps on them wide open. SOS POS sidesteps the phone entirely. It turns the everyday payment terminals in local shops into emergency blocking points. No phone, no app, no call, just your ID number and a PIN on a keypad that’s already on every counter. What moved me is that it’s been live for around six months and has already had real impact, which is rare and which mattered to me as a juror. It takes infrastructure that already exists and quietly repurposes it to protect the people who can least afford the loss. That’s craft in service of someone real.
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