Cannes Lions: Creative Commerce winners 2023 /

Saudia Arabian food delivery app HungerStation has been awarded the Creative Commerce Grand Prix at this year’s Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity.

The Subconscious Order campaign, created by Wunderman Thompson, Riyadh, uses AI to help users choose their food orders based on what they are craving subconsciously. The campaign works by loading images of HungerStation dishes onto the user’s screen and analysing eye-tracking data to see which meals most attract their attention.

It was one of a few ‘biometric commerce’ examples that the jury saw this year, said jury president Nancy Crimi-Lamanna (CCO, FCB Canada), others being functions that enabled consumers to pay with a fingerprint or by having their eyes scanned.

‘The cautionary tale here is that as brands we have to add meaningful value because that is very delicate data that [consumers] are giving up,’ said Crimi-Lamanna. ‘The Grand Prix [winner] did that beautifully.’

The jury also looked for a marriage of ‘purpose to purchase’, said Crimi-Lamanna. ‘We know more than ever that purpose is really critical to brands and we saw that that was being applied to the transaction journey in very meaningful ways. I think that’s really smart because people do not leave their values behind when they shop, they shop with those values.’

Crimi-Lamanna also warned against the siloing of departments such as brand and ecommerce, which must sit together to ensure that the ecommerce experience is seamless and delivers brand equity. ‘Some of the most powerful work showed how brand equity was being built,’ she said. ‘Commerce needs to be central to the idea, not just an outcome of an idea,’ she added. ‘We wanted to see creativity applied to the transaction journey. We also asked ourselves, did it add meaningful value to the customer or did it just complicate things?’

According to Wunderman Thompson, the Subconscious Order was inspired by the insight that an adult spends ‘approximately 132 hours per year looking at online menus before deciding what to eat’ and that ‘the conscious mind can only process 40 bits of information per second, while the subconscious mind can process information up to 500K times faster’.

‘It won because it’s such a beautiful way to get people to order,’ said Crimi-Lamanna. ‘It adds value to that experience, it turns something very transactional into something very emotional. It solved the pain point of choice overload, it gamified it, and it drove discoverability of new foods and places to order.’

According to the agency, The Subconscious Order achieved 2.5 million media impressions and 6,000 new customer visits per day during the campaign period – results that Crimi-Lamanna said were deeply interrogated by the jury. ‘You need to understand that the people on this jury are incredibly invested in these Lions and will go deep and interrogate every piece,’ she said. ‘They want context. Ambiguity will not work in your favour, it will hurt you.’

According to Crimi-Lamanna, this is the first time that a Grand Prix has been awarded to a campaign from Saudi Arabia.

Creative Commerce Gold Winners /

Lunchabuild This, for Lunchables, by Goodby Silverstein & Partners, San Francisco

Oreocodes, for Oreo, by VMLY&R Commerce, New York

Nxt Lvl, for Bank of Montreal, by FCB Toronto 

Iceland Food Club, for Iceland Foods, by Ketchum, London