The Volkswagen Brand scooped a total of 20 Lions at the International Festival of Creativity in Cannes, the world’s most renowned advertising festival. The 300 festival jury members voted Volkswagen among the best in the industry in seven categories. The printed advertisements of Volkswagen Genuine Parts from Brazil and the campaign “The People’s Car Project” from China were especially successful, each taking a Gold Lion.
The Volkswagen brand is one of the most successful automakers among the participants. The brand’s winners include creative works from Germany, South Africa and the United Kingdom among the more than 35,700 entries from 92 countries.
The campaign from China “The People’s Car Project”, which took Gold in the “Branded Content & Entertainment Lions” category shows the development of a future-oriented car in which more than 30 million people participated. In this initiative launched by Volkswagen in 2011, Chinese design students and engineers drew up a design for a car meeting the needs of Chinese drivers on the basis of more than 260,000 ideas submitted. The second Gold Lion went to a Brazilian print campaign of Volkswagen Genuine Parts. With the slogan “Don’t rely on something just because it fits”, the brand takes up the significance of genuine parts in a playful way.
The jury also honoured campaigns with an educational bias. For example, the South African outdoor campaign “Please don’t text and drive” took Silver. In this campaign, the brand draws attention in an intelligent way to the risks of using mobile phones while driving. Another Silver Lion went to the German campaign for Volkswagen Side Assist (“Surprising, what can fit into the dead angle.”) which shows the safety benefits of driver assistance systems for lane changes.
