Cannes Lions 2024: Creative Commerce Lions /

Renault Group and Publicis Conseil, Paris, have won the Grand Prix in the Creative Commerce Lions category at the Cannes Lions festival.

The automotive brand’s Cars to Work scheme gives new job starters the opportunity to lease a vehicle long term or with a buyback option, and only have to start paying it off once they pass the job’s probation period. People could choose from the Dacia range (a Romanian auto brand bought by Renault in 1999) or select a used car through Renew, Renault Group’s global brand for secondhand cars. The campaign involved the participation of the brand’s entire network of 50 dealerships across France, and over 300 garages providing affordable repair services. Renault partnered with France Travail, the governmental agency that provides practical and financial aid to job seekers, to promote Cars to Work, with ads broadcast on TV and online.

The campaign reached 8.8 million French people and gathered 32 million online video impressions (17 million counting those who watched until the end).

Speaking about the campaign to Contagious in May, Publicis Conseil senior copywriter Guillaume Sabbagh said: ‘It’s a logical answer to a big problem. When you get a job, you get a car. And we wanted to turn things around and communicate that, when you get a car, it helps you get the job… And there’s this specific problem in France that during your three-month trial period, you can lose your job at any time, it’s not secure at all – so the banks don’t loan you money. Without a loan, you don’t get a car and without a car you lose your job, voilà.’

Senior artistic director Marie Donnedieu added: ‘The campaign was really dedicated to people in need. Since the beginning, it was for real people, there was a real problem that we wanted to answer. The offer is really for them.’​​​​​​​

Jury president Amy Lanzi, CEO, Digitas North America, said that the jury were very particular in their deliberations because creative commerce can mean everything and nothing at once. They honed in on certain criteria the work had to speak to: building the brand; driving business results; being based on a single human insight and how that insight drove results; the use of innovation and creative technology; and fresh and creative thinking.

She picked out three trends, starting with ‘community commerce IRL…[and] how we’re using commerce and new business models to galvanise a community around a problem’. The second was a convergence of CRM and commerce, and of content and commerce. She referenced the Gold Lion winner Audience Delivery, which saw the delivery app IFood turn its app into a media space for people to watch Fifa World Cup games, as an example of this trend, describing it as ‘entertainment commerce’. 

The final trend was ‘real-time commerce’, and ‘how brands are really capitalising on culture and social to deliver real time commerce outcomes in this space, particularly in retail’. 

Lanzi revealed that the GP winner was representative of a fourth trend, ‘collaborative commerce’. She said of the campaign, ‘This is really a pretty simple human problem. If you do not have the ability to get to work, you need to be able to get to work. If you do not have a job, you cannot get a loan. And it is a vicious cycle.’ Renault, she said, used a collaborative model working with many different entities within France to solve that problem.

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Contagious’ analysts and strategists spend their time at Cannes Lions interviewing jury presidents and attending seminars and press briefings, to find out what’s really going on.

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