2015-05-19

Cannes Lions is back for another round of its highly coveted 7-day awards festival! Dubbed the International Festival of Creativity, Cannes Lions is one of the most prestigious events that celebrates creativity in communication worldwide. Established in 1954, the biggest advertising awards festival takes place in Cannes, France, in June every year.

Set to be held between the 21st to 27th June at the Palais des Festivals, the 62nd Cannes Lions will see highly sought after awards presented to people from the advertising and communications sector. Winners would be awarded with the esteemed Lion trophy, which is widely known as the international benchmark of creative excellence.

Last year, there were over 37,000 entries, with 1143 of these emerging as winners. 15 of them managed to clinch the highest award that the festival has to offer – the Grand Prix.

Just before the Cannes Lions festival takes place, Lions Health, the world’s first festival that celebrates creativity in healthcare, will run from the 19th to 20th June. Founded in 2014, the 2-day event has been bestowing awards to companies with life-changing creative campaigns. Read more about the Lions Health awards in our previous article here.

Other than Lions Health, Lions Innovation will run during the Cannes Lions festival from the 25th to 26th June. Dubbed as “a festival within The Festival”, Lions Innovation commemorates the creative works of companies from the data and technology sector. This year, the festival will be expanding to include a new category – the Creative Data Lions, which aims to include creativity in big data.

In total, 20 categories of awards will be given out this year – 16 from Cannes Lions, 2 from Lions Health, and 2 from Lions Innovation. The 16 categories from Cannes Lions include a wide variety of creative sectors like Radio, Film, Print, Outdoor, and so on.

In 2013, McCann Melbourne made Cannes Lions history when he walked away with a total of 5 Grand Prix for his train-safety campaign with Metro – “Dumb Ways to Die”. The campaign started off as a catchy music video (which has been viewed over a 100,000,000 times). The song went on to reach the top 10 chart of iTunes within 24 hours, and was even made into a game with 2 versions.

Last year, McCann walked away with another Grand Prix (this time for Creative Effectiveness) for another train company, V/Line, with his “Guilt Trip” Campaign.

Check out the full list of last year’s Grand Prix winners here.

Other than the coveted awards, the Cannes Lions festival will also see hundreds of international experts taking centre stage with loads of talks lined up in store for attendees. These speakers include artist Pharrell Williams, who walked away with the Cyber Grand Prix for his “24 Hours of Happy” music video, comedian, actress, and YouTube star Grace Helbig, Snapchat’s founder and CEO Evan Spiegel, actress, comedian, and producer Julia Louis-Dreyfus, who is widely known for her part in NBC’s Seinfield, and many more!

Network with tens and thousands of people from all over the creative sector globally, including agency creatives, client marketers, analysts, and so on. There will even be pop-up venues at the Festival for official delegates to network with one another. Click here to find out more.

So, what are you waiting for? Don’t miss out on the biggest International Festival for Creativity; click here to get your passes now! For more information, check out Cannes Lions’ official website here.

Get a feel or what this year’s event will be like, by checking out what went down at the 2014 Cannes Lions festival below!

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