Isn't it great? The two campaigns winning the most Cannes Lions have nothing in common.

Last week lots of ad people went to party and learn at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity. Judges set the bar again for a year concerning the highly subjective question of what is a creative idea. I was very happy in 2012 (when my concept got two shortlists), but I am also glad now that two of my favourite things have been considered as great work: Fun and Smartness. Let's see why they can be called opposites.


FUN

The Dumb Ways to Die campaign was created for Metro Trains by McCann Melbourne. A simple, I would even risk saying, mediocre basic idea executed with amazing craft resulted in a campaign that is just loveable. Why do I say the basic idea is mediocre? Because if you tell someone about it in a sentence, they won't label it as genius. Animated figures are dying in dumb ways, because you should be careful not to step on the rails. It is something that usually doesn't go through an internal meeting, only if creatives show some music, some details of art and craft that will go into the work. Don't get me wrong, I love this clip, similarly to many other famous campaigns based on a mediocre idea BUT exectuted perfectly. So I hope, in the near future, we will have a chance to see more funny, loveable ideas which may even be a little stupid.

SMARTNESS

The other big winner of Cannes is the Real Beauty Sketches campaign for Dove by Ogilvy Sao Paulo. Now this is exactly the opposite of the previous work. A concept so intelligent you can't avoid falling in love with it. Let's hire a police drawer and sit him down behind a curtain, then ask a woman on the other side to describe her looks so that the guy can draw a portrait purely based on her view of herself. Then make a second portrait of her but this time asking a friend to describe her. Compare the drawings. You are more beautiful than you think. Amazing. You don't need to add much in execution, maybe some piano music.

So what's the learning? Thank god, creativity cannot be defined. Sometimes funny details will make you drop your jaw, while in other cases the smartness of the big idea will "draw you in".

A few years ago, there was some project to build a robot that develops print ads without any human contribution. I hope the Cannes Lions Festival has shown again that it doesn't make sense to engineer creativity with pure logic. There is no formula of a great idea, but only human genius that may sometimes result in things people just love.