Cannes Lions 2024: Creative Strategy Lions /

Dutch telco KPN has won the Creative Strategy Grand Prix for A Piece of Me, a song and music video raising awareness of the consequences of the unwanted forwarding of intimate images. 

Developed by Dentsu Creative, Amsterdam, in partnership with Dutch singer-songwriter Meau, A Piece of Me follows a teenage girl as she faces the consequences of her nudes being shared with her classmates. It falls under the brand’s #BetterInternet platform, with the message ‘Think Before You Forward’.

The Creative Strategy jury asked one question up front this year: could this work have happened without great strategy? If the answer was yes, it didn’t qualify for consideration, said jury president Vita M. Harris, global CSO, FCB.

Several conclusions emerged during the judging process, she explained. ‘How adept, attuned and expansive modern strategy needs to be. How important and enduring brand values, purpose and connectivity are now more than ever before. We realised that if this industry and more specifically, strategists, are not learning something new about a lived experience or culture other than their own every single day, it’s impossible to be current.’ Anyone not expanding their perspective is doomed to create work that is ‘obsolete, untimely, not resonant and not effective for the brands that we serve’.Lastly, Harris said, ‘creative strategy doesn't have to decide between building brands and business or driving positive change in the world – smart modern strategy has the ability to do both seamlessly at the same time.’

The Grand Prix winner was the natural winner because ‘it fired on so many cylinders strategically’, said Harris. ‘This is a telco that seriously dared to take on a very current issue that was really devastating teens' lives. Online shaming leads to depression, loneliness, even suicide, and KPN was careful to flip the narrative that so often portrays the victim as the perpetrator, she added.

‘We are not blind to what’s going on within society and families or kids,’ Dave Frauenfelder, VP brand, marketing communications and sponsorships at KPN, told Contagious in an interview published on Contagious IQ, earlier this year. ‘The thing that creates the most tension on this project is we have never taught people how to act or how to behave on the internet. We also don’t want to brag about how good we are or about the quality of the network, we just want to step in and help society together with the right partner, so it had to be authentic.’

This work rose to the top ‘because of the brilliance of the insight, that’s the job of strategy’, said Harris. ‘It wasn’t just local to this particular market, it drew attention to a global issue and caught on around the world.’

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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.

Then, we use our two decades of experience to put those findings into perspective and analyse what they mean for marketing and the marketing industry.

Finally, we condense all those insights and case studies into an informative, insightful and (occasionally) entertaining 50-minute briefing (plus 10 minutes of Q&A) that we deliver to brands and agencies.

Book a Cannes Deconstructed briefing and you’ll learn:

• The strategies that underpin the big winners
• The jury perspective on what it took to win in 2024
• The trends that are shaping the most effective, influential work and what they mean for brands
• The brands and campaigns that are raising the bar for commercial creativity

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