eurobest Highlights Our Current Taste for Extremes

It might not be Cannes in June but Rome in late November certainly has its charms. The Eurobest Festival of European Creativity is a reliable barometer of the mood and creative tone across the region, made even more apparent on this occasion because the event coincided with feelings of strong social and political unrest in Italy. 

I’m no political radical myself, but my continual thought while in Rome was that Eurobest was an expression of culture’s, and therefore advertising’s, current taste for extremes. This may be reflective of the current prevailing political mood, where there seems to be little fondness for the middle ground, because it was the same in terms of the winners at the event. 

There was nothing in the middle, what won was consistently at the extremes in terms of, at one end, the purest expression of an idea executed in such a way as to not dilute the insight itself. Take the Brad is Single campaign for Norwegian Airlines (above), which was awarded the Grand Prix in Print & Publishing in Rome. This was utterly simple, culturally relevant and timely. Highlighting the importance of work that has the power to travel the world solely on the merit of the idea, regardless of how traditional the execution and media selection. Three years ago, this kind of work wasn’t winning at the big awards because people deemed it too simple and not enough of a big leap. Its success demonstrates that we are returning to the basics at one end of the spectrum. 

At the other end is the more progressive, subversive, stuff. The ideas that are uncomfortable for people in advertising to look at because we don’t quite know in which box to put them. They blur the lines between categories, forcing us to ask “Is it a promo?” It might not quite be “direct’ yet it happened outdoors and also contained a massive interactive component.

Look at the Radio Grand Prix, Sound of Glory for Ford in Spain (above), for example, or the sadistic Survival Billboard for Microsoft’s Xbox. Two cases that showed that work that can’t be pinned down currently wins big. Landing the awards because it subverts the boundaries in terms of delivering the message and interacting with the consumer. This work doesn’t just use channels for novelty effect but to form a deeply-layered experience that’s more immersive and relevant. This is refreshing because, while many advertising ideas today possess these layers and touchpoints, the big winners use them to enhance a great idea. 

Beyond the success of work at the extremes, the overriding sense at Eurobest was of winning ideas that were driven and informed by culture. All the winners from The Next Rembrandt (above) in Digital Craft for ING, through to We’re The Superhumans for Channel 4 in Film, highlighted that the best work comes from an understanding of, and connection to, wider culture. Eurobest emphasised that brands that apply a strong lens to popular culture are the ones that succeed. This, in turn, explains why work at the extremes proved to be so successful: because the middle ground is currently a no-man’s land in politics and culture, it’s also so in advertising.