CANNES – Since its conception in 2014, Lions Health has grown bigger than ever this year. The competition received a total of 2,607 entries, up from just 1862 last year, a testament to the increasing value of using creativity to tackle and address healthcare issues.
The main goal of Lions Health, according to Pharma jury president Alexandra von Plato, and as we can well see in the themes of the winning campaigns, is to get people to talk about sensitive topics like illnesses ranging from cancer to diabetes and respiratory diseases. These works also try to convince people that taking care of their health is not something that should be put off or avoided. It should be the norm.
“Creativity is all about breaking into somebody’s consciousness. The thing about health is people generally don’t want to think about it. That actually is what makes it hard,” explains von Plato. “People are shopping for a car, they’re shopping for sneakers, they’re thinking aspirationally about other things that they’re in the market for but they’re actually lots of times actively not trying to think about health.”
Apart from the Grand Prix winner, ‘Breathless Choir’ by Ogilvy & Mather UK for Philips, some of the Pharma judges shared in one of the sessions of #insidethejuryroom that one of their personal favorites is JJ-Man, a campaign by McCann Health Hong Kong for Priligy that injected humor to a film that talks about the importance of consulting with a doctor about premature ejaculation.
A lot of campaigns entered in the Health & Wellness category also used humor to talk about serious diseases like breast and testicular cancer.
“We saw a lot of campaigns that clearly used humor as a way into some difficult healthcare ideas and conversation that nobody wants to think about or talk about,” share Joshua Prince, Health & Wellness jury president. “Two cases that we saw both the ’Man boobs’ and the ‘Testi-monials’ out of South Africa used humor in a really effective way.”
This is not to say that humor is the only effective way as evident in the two Grand Prix winners ‘Breathless Choir’ and ‘Project LIteracy’ by FCB Inferno.
Lions Health also saw trends in campaigns that talk about cancer. Though the jury recognizes the attention that needs to be given to this widespread terminal disease, Prince thinks that the world needs more work that tackles healthcare issues that no one would think of talking about.
“Cancer clearly is one of the major health issues in the world today. There’s plenty of other areas though. I was surprised at how few entries we saw around diabetes, a major massive global epidemic in developed countries. We really didn’t see attention paid to that. We need to see more work on that particular healthcare space.”
