Unexpected Media

MipTV: the labs come to Cannes

Unexpected Media has had an extraordinarily busy couple of months including a visit to Winnipeg to run a workshop for the National Screen Institute of Canada, a “meet the players” session at the European Media Event in Brussels, three Innovation Labs for the BBC (with one more still to deliver) and a lab in Cannes in the context of the Content 360 pitching contest at MipTV.

The Lab in Cannes, which was for the six contestants in Ogilvy’s cause-related marketing competition lasted for two and a half days: half the time that we normally have for a BBC Innovation Lab. The participants were all working on ideas that associated a good cause with brands selected by Ogilvy from their accounts. The projects that made it to the final were proposing projects for Fanta, AmEx and BP.

The format was a public pitch of all the projects on Tuesday morning, two days of work with a mentoring team including Richard Adams (Chemistry Digital), Matt Marsh (First Hand) and Heather Croall (Sheffield Doc/Fest) alongside people from Ogilvy, a final public pitch on Thursday afternoon. After hearing the first pitches, the mentoring team met with the jury to hear their feedback and to find out from them what would make for a winning pitch by the end of the process. It was clear at this stage that different jury members favoured different projects and that there was no obvious winner.

We agreed that each competitor would need to tell four convincing stories in their six minute pitch:

• an impact story: how the campaign would change the world
• a brand story: is the proposal good for the brand (and does it fit with the brand values)
• a user story: will people really want to interact with the proposed product or service
• a product or service story: is the proposal for a really compelling campaign.

We spent the first day deconstructing the original pitches, working through the judges’ feedback. In one case the cause, brand and proposal didn’t seem properly integrated, in another the campaign’s strong message was lost in unnecessary and distracting embellishments, a third had chosen not to refer to a specific brand. We then had the teams pitch to a ‘watering-hole’ of mentors, Ogilvy personnel, brand representatives and invited creatives to get final guidance.

By the time of the second public pitching sessions all the presentations had changed: some radically, others more subtly. There was one stand-out winner: Fanta’s Heros. It was a simple, compelling and powerful pitch and the judges were unanimous. Unexpectedly they decided to award an additional three prizes: $5,000 each to two projects which will also be pitched to the brands. They also gave €1,000 to two students from Slovenia aged 21 and 22 who had performed amazingly well as the only team not working in their first language.

Turning one prize into four, persuading Ogilvy to take three projects forward seems like quite an endorsement of the Lab process.