Why did Cadbury's Dairy Milk ad bag the Grand Prix?

By Anuradha Sengupta, CNBC-TV18

The Gorilla film for Cadbury’s Dairy Milk picked up the Film Grand Prix.The Grand Prix winners have done the best work in Advertising and Marketing communication from around the world for 2007.

According to Craig Davis, Jury President - Press & Film Lions, The Gorilla is just sheer entertainment value. He said, “I think that is what is extraordinary about it. I love the fact that it subverts all the conventions in the category and that is great.”

Phil Rumbol, Marketing Director of Cadbury Schweppes in Britain and Ireland said, “It has been viewed around the world by things like YouTube. But with it being a 90-second ad, coverage build was slower than normal. After three weeks, we paid for airtime. That meant that about 40% of the UK population should have seen it. The brand awareness of the ad was above 60% and that was all down to the fact that people were saying, “Have you seen the Cadbury’s ad with the gorilla playing the drums?” and people were looking on the Internet. So, the two really worked well together.”

Sharing the honour with that hugely popular gorilla film this year was a second film Grand Prix for the campaign for the video game, Halo 3, created by the McCann Worldgroup-San Francisco. It started out as a purely internet campaign to launch Microsoft’s latest Xbox game.

Set in the future, the campaign shows war veterans reliving their experiences. The campaign even recreated a war memorial and museum simulating a real world scenario that set up the theme of the game without talking about it. This approach helped connect with non-gamers as well. The Halo 3 campaign also picked up the Integrated Grand Prix.

Craig Davis feels that it was quite a different thing with Halo. According to him, the whole experience becomes immersive by the time you have seen two or three of these films. You feel like you are completely immersed in this world. You are just drawn into it and it is a very thorough and complete experience, he added.

According to Samidha, the Titanium Grand Prix given out for the 'most breakthrough idea of the year' went to Projector Tokyo for its work for Japanese clothing brand Uniqlock, a unique clock that was downloaded by millions across the world. It was an unusual way to popularise the apparel markers catalogue. So, as time passed these dancers had different clothes for different times of the day and eventually the year, she said.

Mark Tutsell, Jury President, Titanium & Integrated Lions said, “It was a work that made you just go wow. It stopped you dead in your tracks and was so different. Some people found it very hard to connect with it, and were saying, “Wow, I have never seen anything like this before in my life.” That for me was the power of it. It was so radically different and it really took full advantage of a new world.”

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