Adland Stakes Its Claim for Relevance with New-Found 'Appliance of Science'

‘The appliance of science’ is one of my favourite advertising lines. It elevated our perception of Zanussi kitchen appliances from being simply ‘white goods’ to the pinnacle of household technology.

That was a long time ago. But this year’s Cannes Grand Prix winners demonstrate advertising’s strength in creatively applying science to solving problems, and using this to elevate good ideas into great ones. 

Savlon’s ‘Healthy Hands Chalk’, the Creative Effectiveness winner for Ogilvy Mumbai, is a brilliant example of how a reformulation of chalk can save the lives of children in India. It’s a simple appliance of science to a huge national problem, and done in a way that’s insightful with regards to the culture and traditions of the country. The mobile category saw the application of facial recognition technology to reveal the corruption of Brazil’s politicians in Grey Brazil Sao Paulo’s ‘Corruption Detector’ work.

Traditionally we’re used to seeing great technology in the Innovation category, but Kingo Energy, which triumphed in Product Design with work from Ogilvy Colombia Bogota, isn’t simply about harnessing solar energy to replace traditional energy in Colombia. There’s a commercial innovation at work here which enables even the poorest people to access electricity by buying it at the corner store, like they would buy a candle.

In the Glass category, the winner was AMV BBDO’s Bodyform ad, ‘#Bloodnormal’, the first UK ad to depict actual menstrual blood. Since school, science has a habit of being a bit detached from humanity but this ad is rich in insight and emotion.

‘Trash Isles’, another from AMV BBDO, applies the science of economics to the global problem of plastic waste. With 8 million tonnes of plastic being dumped every year, there’s a plastic island the size of France, which they’ve made a country. Officially. And other than a population (which it invites its audience to be) the island fulfils all the criteria to get UN ratification.

The science of colour and how it can make you feel has been well documented since the Bauhaus movement but Apple’s Home Pod is a great story technically delivered with undisputed brilliance. It’s where science meets art.

Perhaps the most ingenious application of science at Cannes is the ‘JFK Unsilenced’ campaign for The Times, from Irish agency Rothco, which involved creating a database of 116,777 phonetic sound units to build an authentic representation of JFK’s Trade Mart speech in Dallas. It’s a powerful rewriting of history, and has a human resonance that even over half a century later is powerful. But the application of this science is even more effective as the technology is being adopted by a range of companies to help ALS sufferers rediscover their voices.

With all this in mind, I still find it strange that, in our education system, science and art are positioned at opposite extremes when hand-in-hand they are the pinnacle of problem solving. Much is made of advertising’s cultural relevance, or lack of it, but it’s really encouraging that the industry is addressing the issue that our schools so brazenly ignore. In the process of fusing art with science, the world’s best agencies have delivered some compelling creative work that tackles not only business concerns but the world’s problems too. 

David Harris is Chief Creative Officer at gyro UK