Cannes Lions: Making creativity a year-round pursuit

The Innovation team at Instinctif harness the best of the future to deliver market-leading ideas in the present. The team’s specialism spans digital strategy and marketing, data & analytics, and strategic brand. With the world and news agenda fast-changing around us, now’s the time to get agile in how we think and work.

This newsletter brings you the best of the week in the ‘new normal’, straight from the desk of the Innovation team.

In the creative world, the Cannes Lions Awards have been known as the global benchmark for endeavour and excellence since 1954.

During this year of change and shake-ups, Cannes Lions has looked to a new approach, to encourage vision and imagination on a daily basis; a new digital platform called Lions.

Launching this week during the October Lions Live (19 – 23 October), the platform spotlights the brand’s four focus areas; community, intelligence, learning and benchmarking.

As well as driving fresh thinking outside of the Awards week, Lions is also designed to be accessible to those in all corners of the creative industry – regardless of title or role.

Simon Cook, Lions managing director, spoke with Campaign to share his vision behind the development – and explore why it’s needed now more than ever:

“We want to acknowledge that creativity has been established as a very powerful force that accelerates careers, shapes society and drives business performance. For that reason, creativity can no longer be tethered to a single point in the year.”

“The creation of Lions is a very natural evolution of our business that brings our portfolio of services onto a single platform – The Home of Creativity.”

“Our aim is to provide those in the business of creativity with access to the insight and support they’ve asked for to enable them to drive progress through creativity, every day.”

Check out the new platform here.

This week’s tool sees seller turned buyer, as IKEA offers to purchase your furniture.

The Swedish homeware giant is doing its bit to reduce its impact on the environment, with a new ‘Buy Back’ scheme, giving customers the chance to earn some credit for their unwanted bookcases, bed frames and other pre-loved furniture.

The plan will offer vouchers worth up to 50% of the item’s original price, to be spent at its stores.

The new scheme looks set to launch on 27 November, timed to coincide with Black Friday. According to the retailer, “By making sustainable living more simple and accessible, IKEA hopes that the initiative will help its customers take a stand against excessive consumption this Black Friday and in the years to come.” 

This week we share a tip which has caught the attention of the Innovation team at large:

For many, it has felt as though negative news has appeared at every turn lately.  So, for a nice change of pace, a positive palette-cleanser among the more uninspiring updates, this week we’re sharing the heart-warming tale of Edmund O’Leary, an unemployed Dad of two who took his mental health struggle to Twitter and received a response that reaffirmed our faith in humanity.

O’Leary tweeted the below on Friday when feeling isolated living alone:

‘I am not okay. Feeling rock bottom. Please take a few seconds to say hello if you see this tweet. Thank you’

The public – and various celebrities – rallied around O’Leary, and his post was met with thousands of messages, greetings, pictures and videos in a bid to cheer him up. Over the weekend the post received more than 100,000 replies and over 300,000 likes. Safe to say the public rose to the occasion.

O’Leary has since said that the “reaction to the tweet was absolutely phenomenal” and stated the response reminded that he is “not alone”.

It’s an example of the power of social media when used for good – and reminder to look out for each other during these difficult times.