Mexico succeeded. It was just the second day of the Cannes Lions 2021 international festival of creativity and the industry had already broken its own record by obtaining nine medals, a figure higher than the five awards with which it said goodbye to the 2019 contest.
Leo Burnett and Publicis are responsible for this achievement. The agencies, subsidiaries of Publicis Groupe, received gold, silver and bronze lions for their Untouchables and #SeguimosHablando campaigns, respectively.
Leo Burnett México, led by Horacio Navarro, was the creative firm that gave Mexico its first awards at the festival. On day one of the contest, the advertising agency obtained two recognitions for Untouchables.
This work, which was carried out to develop a method for the detection of breast cancer through thermography, received a silver lion in the Health & Wellness category and a bronze one in Outdoor.
The recognition “confirms that the agency generates comprehensive multiplatform work, and for this it involves a high creative level, a deep knowledge of the audiences and an understanding of innovation tools,” explains Horacio Navarro, CEO of Leo Burnett México.
Untouchables arises in response to the low number of women who are screened to detect breast cancer early in rural communities, because there are still men who forbid their wives to undergo the necessary tests, because they do not want them to be seen by other people.
To modify the Inegi statistics, which ensures that Mexico is one of the countries with the highest mortality rate from breast cancer in Latin America (in 2019, 35.24 new cases were reported for every 100,000 women aged 20 years or older) Eva Center installed a portable thermal imaging camera in 80 communities in 14 states across the country.
Through a digital infrared study, the women were able to know their health status without the need to be touched or seen by other people.
“We knew it would work from the first moment, because cultural insight is very strong in rural communities, and Eva’s technology has been more than proven over the years, in different field works,” says Horacio Navarro. . To date, Eva Center has carried out more than 20,000 studies, which has made it possible to detect more than 1,500 cases of breast cancer in time.
#SeguimosHablando wins prizes
On the second day of Cannes Lions 2021, the agency Publicis Worldwide México won seven awards with the #SeguimosHablando campaign: two bronze in the PR category, one gold and one silver in Social and Influencer, another gold and one more than silver in Direct and a bronze in Media.
The work, which was carried out together with the organization for the defense and legal representation of journalists at risk Propuesta Cívica, ‘revived’ four journalists murdered in Mexico, Javier Valdez, Miroslava Breach, Moisés Sánchez and José Armando Rodríguez ‘El Choco’, to demand justice for their deaths and those of their colleagues in the country.
On April 29, 2019, the journalists’ Twitter accounts were reactivated to narrate the threats they received and the possible causes of their murders. “The campaign seeks to demand justice for all members of the press who have been murdered, and to make this tragedy visible as the first step to generate concrete actions to end this problem,” explained Diego Wallach, creative director of the agency at that time. .
To achieve this, “we gave ourselves the task of investigating what the work, life, language and more of the four journalists were like, in order to give them a voice that represented the way in which each one spoke to reality,” he added.
In November 2020, the second installment of the campaign arrived, in which journalist Javier Valdez demanded justice from President Andrés Manuel López Obrador. “Today technology helps us to draw the attention of society to demand protection for those who allow us to know the truths of what is happening in Mexico,” said the creative director.
This second installment of #SeguimosHablando, which was the only campaign that Publicis sent to Cannes Lions this year, has garnered several important international awards. In May, it won the Yellow Pencil, which is the highest award given at the D&AD festival, becoming the first Mexican agency to win this recognition.
Another relevant recognition was given to him at the IAB Mixx 2020 awards. At the local competition, he won the Grand Prix for his creativity and effectiveness in digital media. This was the first time the award was given, in previous years the category had been declared deserted.
After a pause caused by the pandemic, Cannes Lions arrives this year – virtually – to reward the best works from 90 different countries, produced in 2019 and 2020. On the third day of the festival, which takes place from June 21 to 25 , more than 650 lions have already been delivered.
The Mexican creative industry, which in 2015 managed to obtain 27 lions, is waiting to receive more recognitions in the remainder of the festival.
