Cannes Contenders: Non-Network Creativity from Canada

The value and role of play in our society has been progressively diminished. As both dads to young kids and creatives in this industry, imagination and play is an incredibly important part of our work and home lives. So, we were naturally very proud of this campaign. It had a smart insight, a clear brand purpose, and unlike so many purpose-driven spots, we delivered it with a fun and lighthearted approach. The industry desperately needs more of that!    

In 2022, more than 1,500 books were banned from US school districts, with some politicians even threatening to burn books that they deemed 'inappropriate'. In response to this alarming wave of censorship, Rethink helped Penguin Random House partner with legendary author Margaret Atwood to create a single, fireproof edition of her dystopian novel (and one of the most frequently banned books in the world) 'The Handmaid’s Tale'. 'The Unburnable Book' was sewn and bound by hand, and made using materials that are fireproof up to 2,600°F. 

The campaign launched at the PEN America Gala with a video that showed Atwood using a flamethrower to try and burn her own book. Not exactly your typical influencer campaign! The single edition was auctioned off at Sotheby’s New York, selling for an impressive $130,000, with all proceeds going to PEN America to help fight censorship. The campaign was shared around the world, from The Washington Post to 'Late Night with Seth Meyers', earning over 12 billion earned impressions and $35 million in earned media. 

We’ve all been there - we reach for a bottle of Heinz Ketchup on a table in a restaurant, and something isn’t right. The taste, the texture - someone has put a generic ketchup in a Heinz Bottle. Rather than shy away from this truth, Heinz saw an opportunity to not only to tell a product superiority story in an unconventional way, but also a way to forge new business relationships with restaurants. Starting with true-to-life images that put the cultural truth front and centre, 'Ketchup Fraud' started a conversation. But, the brand didn’t just stop with awareness. Heinz also set out to end Ketchup Fraud once and for all - asking consumers to name restaurants and places they’d experienced generic ketchup in a Heinz bottle. This led to new business relationships, and businesses converting to the real thing with the help of Heinz. During the campaign, the brand even won back America’s most iconic ballpark - Fenway Park, home to the Boston Red Sox - which is now officially serving Heinz. 

In 2022, Heinz became the first brand to create a campaign using AI generated art via DALL·E 2. The program creates images based on user prompts - you simply type in a a request, and in less than a minute, DALL·E 2 generates an image.

Providing the simple prompt of  'Ketchup Bottle', unsurprisingly, the results generated by DALL·E 2 were unmistakable as bottles of Heinz, proving once again that Heinz equals ketchup. The images then became the heart of a 360 global campaign. The brand even invited consumers to suggest their own prompts, which also were turned into art by DALL·E 2, and custom labels were created based on the images. The launch captured global attention, and in response to the campaign, DALL·E 2 was actually retrained to limit showing preference to brands (Sorry!). 

The Royal Canadian Legion, together with HomeEquity Bank, connected current homeowners to the sacrifices of the past by sending replicas of many of these letters to their original addresses (in 29 cities across Canada). You can find letters delivered near your home at Letters-Home.ca.

Inflation keeps rising, mortgage rates keep rising, and gas prices are off the charts. But nobody should be priced out of pizza! To fight inflation, Pizza Pizza introduced 'Fixed-Rate Pizza', allowing pizza lovers across Canada to lock in any extra-large, four-topping pizza for a fixed rate of $16.99 (for a one-year term). In short, no matter how bad inflation gets, your pizza price stays the same.

A global brand beloved in over 180 countries, Nescafé has long prioritised its sustainable efforts. But, as the topic of sustainability grew more prevalent amongst its many competitors, the brand needed a way to both stand out in a crowded market and remind everyone of what makes the brand a household staple, worldwide. The answer lay in its instantly recognisable jar, which played a significant role in many people’s individual sustainable efforts long after the container’s original contents were gone. 'Jars' is a showcase of the container’s mighty recycling potential, as people around the world reimagine the jar as anything from a piggy bank to painting supply holder, or even a modest planter. And because 50% of Canadian Nescafé consumers are diverse, we told a story that highlighted a unifying habit - one that resonated with an array of households, especially among new Canadians.

Right now, there’s a lot of discussion about income inequality and whether it’s OK that some people have billions of dollars in the bank, while so much of the population is barely able to afford the cost of living. We thought that by being part of the discussion in a provocative way, the Jane/Finch Community and Family Centre might find its way into more conversations, and therefore be able to educate more people about the amazing work they do. 

There are many reasons contributing to why Asian Canadians to adopt an anglicised name. Unfortunately, the prevalence of racism and hate is one of them (it's the top reason for westernising ethnic names), and this is actually furthered with microaggressions made by the world's most popular word processor. Specifically, Microsoft Word still identifies non-English names as mistakes; the jarring red line under one’s name saying - in the language of software - something Asians hear all too often, 'You don’t belong'.

To confront the issue, we discovered a little-known function of Microsoft Word, custom dictionaries, a tool that allows anyone to create and add a list of terms that are outside of the programme’s native lexicon. This gave us the chance to create change for billions of users. Where custom dictionaries are widely used by the medical community, due to their ability to normalise non-standard terminology, no one has attempted to create one in the name of societal change… until now. 

So, we created the world’s first custom dictionary of 8,000+ Asian names using a little-known function of MS Word, and made it freely available for Canadians to download. 'ReclaimYourName.dic' normalised Asian identity for more than a billion users, without rewriting a single line of code. It has since been adopted by Microsoft in a global update.

After years of targeting families (often with childlike programming and an emphasis on brand mascot, 'Chester Cheetah'), Canadians figured Cheetos was just for kids. Not to mention, to appeal to parents, the brand had downplayed Cheetos' most distinctive and divisive quality, 'Cheetle', the orange, messy, indulgent dust. But by 2022, Canadian sales were plateauing. The consumer had evolved, and only 22% of households that purchased Cheetos had kids, signaling an untapped opportunity to fuel distinction for the brand, and increase relevance and top-of-mind awareness among adults. The campaign’s objective was to unleash some playful mischief and galvanise public sentiment around Cheetle - allowing it to become a celebrated part of the brand's lexicon... not something to be  washed off.

Fun fact: Alberta, Canada has a particular penchant for oversized landmarks. It’s home to over 30 of them in fact, including huge foods from giant mushrooms in Vilna, to the world’s largest sausage in Mundare. When we discovered a tiny Albertan hamlet of 83 called Cheadle, we found our opportunity, and built a monument to memorialise our iconic orange dust.  

We erected the 17-foot statue of a hand holding a Cheetos Puff, its Cheetle-covered fingertips proudly on display, with no fanfare, pre-roll, or social ads. We posted on local advertorial, grabbed a bag of Cheetos, and waited for the first eyes to land on the supersized snack.

What started as a few drive-bys quickly turned into a pilgrimage of thousands daily - many traveling across Canada for a selfie with the statue.

If you’re going to submit work into the Cannes Lions Festival, it’s got to be standout - against the competitive set, amongst your own agency’s portfolio, and on the international stage. And by 'standout', we mean it has to be break through with the audience and within the category, be novel in terms of the idea, flawless in craft, and have achieved benchmark-setting success. And hey, if the case study can include an '…EVER!' or '…first for the category!', that often means you’ve got a standout campaign. 'Hilton on the Green' did all those things and more.

In 2019, Hilton Canada signed a multi-year agreement to become Golf Canada’s official hotel partner. Hilton had big plans to kick-off the partnership at the next PGA event, but then covid-19 hit and as a result, Hilton had to wait three years before it could launch this partnership at a live event. When it finally came time to activate, we needed to do something that would standout - to inaugurate the partnership - but also to ensure Hilton was top-of-mind as people began travelling again after a long hiatus. 

So, we built a one-of-a-kind, luxury, 200 square foot pop-up hotel that didn’t just show up at a live PGA event... It literally popped-up on the course. Six lucky contest winners got to have the stay-of-a-lifetime just off the green. It was a first for the category, a first for Hilton, and became the most talked about Hilton Canada activation EVER, earning half-a-billion media impressions, 2 million engagements, more mentions than any other hotel brand during the campaign, and got talked about in eight countries.

For us, 'Hilton on the Green' met the standout criteria; it was breakthrough, novel, benchmark-setting, and even achieved an '…EVER!' and 'a first for the category'. Let’s just hope the judges agree!

Food insecurity has been a substantial issue in Canada for decades, but in March of 2022, we had reached a level of crisis, with over 1 million people seeking the help of a food bank in a single month. As a charity, nearly 100% of Canadians are aware of Food Banks Canada, but confusion exists on the breadth and scope of its mission to relieve hunger today and prevent hunger tomorrow. 

To stop hunger in its tracks, we needed to make people realise how much bigger hunger is than we commonly think. Hunger is taking over too many Canadians lives. It’s much bigger than just being hungry. It prevents us from reaching our potential, and the future of Canada as a whole. We needed to stop talking about feeding hungry people, and so we called on Canadians to fight back and starve the hunger out of Canada.

The campaign launched with a two-minute brand film that brought hunger to life in an unexpected and terrifying fashion, anchoring a national movement.

'Starve the Hunger' is the most successful brand campaign in Food Banks Canada history. The campaign garnered more than 34 million earned media impressions, 500% over the campaign benchmarks. The campaign videos had an impressive .64% completion rate (industry standard is .06% - .012%), and most critically, had an increase in website click throughs of over 2,000% (compared to the last awareness campaign window).

With collaboration from our amazing production partners, we brought to life a beautiful film that drove real results. This crafted work frames up food insecurity unlike anything ever before in the category, putting a spotlight on how unnoticed hunger can go in a country like Canada. It can be the kid sitting next to your kid at school, or the cashier checking you out at the grocery store. Canada is one of the richest countries in the world, but the amount our population struggles with food insecurity is too high. We’re proud of this partnership and the work we are doing to fight back against this issue. Together we will starve the hunger.