Dumb Ways to Die, most awarded advertising campaign in Cannes Lions history.
The Guardian: A campaign to promote train safety featuring animated characters involved in extremely Dumb Ways to Die has been named the best TV advertising campaign in the world, pipping Channel 4's Meet the Superhumans ad for the London Paralympics.
Dumb Ways to Die, a clever public service message from Metro Trains in Melbourne, has swept all before it becoming the most successful ad campaign in the history of the Cannes International Festival of Creativity.
The TV and online ad, which features characters killed in bizarre ways such as poking a bear with a stick and swimming with piranhas to push the idea that deaths due to silly activity on or around trains are the most pointless, has become an internet hit notching up more than 50m views on YouTube.
The campaign, by agency McCann Melbourne, has taken five grand prix awards, the most that a campaign has ever notched up at the awards. It has won the film, radio, PR, direct and integrated categories.
It is the second year running that the top film award has gone to a campaign with a social message — US fast food chain Chipotle won last year with a similarly-styled animation-with-music ad about sustainable farming and production.
Channel 4's Meet the Superhumans campaign to change the image of Paralympic athletes ahead of the London 2012 Games, which featured the Public Enemy track Harder Than You Think, picked up a Gold Lion.
Sir John Hegarty, co-founder of ad agency BBH and president of the 23-strong jury, said of the campaign: "When you've got some really outstanding work it is tragic in some ways it can't get a bigger award, but there can only be one grand prix".
Jury member Carlo Cavallone, executive creative director at agency 72andsunny, expanded on the judging process: "[Meet the Superhumans] is an amazing campaign, one of the golds that went through [the judging process] immediately," he said. "Everyone felt it had the highest level of craft. It puts an issue that was really important before London 2012 to raise awareness of the Paralympics [and] they were hyper successful … Dumb Ways to Die was a tough contender. Amazing music piece, amazing editing."
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2013/jun/22/cannes-lions-advertising-awards
