President’s Pick: Vita M.Harris, Creative Strategy Lions

Uniting the public to be the public infrastructure they needed, Renault created a recharge community as a strategic workaround to the time constraints, bureaucracy and cost of physically building the infrastructure to support EV adoption. This proved the power of creativity in solving a hard-core business issue that could have been a longstanding barrier to the category and brand adoption and growth.

Injecting vigour into a 150-year-old category leader wasn’t an easy strategic task. Cashing in on the brand’s century-long investment in carving out a distinctive space in people’s minds was a highly effective solution. It avoided the easy approach to differentiation – featuring attributes or RTBs or benefits or claims – the traps that can often cause strong brands to swirl in a sea of sameness. Instead, it leaned all the way into its identity/affinity as ingrained in over 90% of minds – Heinz is ketchup. It was simple, stupid and a whole lot of fun.

The can was the media plan. Using your product to reach places that traditional media can’t and to reach an audience as big as any TV show isn’t your typical creative strategy. In all, 35m Guaranà soda cans became the media channel for 10 other brands to advertise on to address the sponsorship disparity between women’s and men’s football. This triple play – simultaneous brand building and revenue generation for Guaranà, 10 other brands and women’s football – is creativity as an economic multiplier.

Circumventing the law with the law. Developing a creative strategy that not only outsmarted the law but eventually overturned it was no small feat. This demonstrates that smart brand strategy can exceed generating awareness and building brand affinity to drive real social change – even cornering politicians to do the right thing.

Subverting bias, and then reframing it. The online hijacking of a pervasive, racialised and derogatory phrase via data and technology was a highly strategic move. And then on the heels of this, to positively reframe that very phrase to showcase the beauty of a country that has been marginalised was simply brilliant. Not to mention that this campaign was executed before it was popular or common for marketers to take a stand on such issues.