Stockland Martel

“Beyond the Still,” the unique HD video contest created by Grey New York and Vincent Laforet to promote the Canon EOS 7D, won two big awards at the Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival last week: a Silver in the Promo & Activation category for Best Use of Games, including Sweepstakes, Contests & Prize Draws and a Gold in the Media Lions category for Best Use of Branded Content.

Update: After this entry was posted, we learned that “Beyond the Still” also won a Bronze award in the Titanium and Integrated category, which comprises a shortlist of 25 entries from across all of the categories in the competition. In other words, a major coup for Vincent—and the first Bronze in the Titanium category in Grey Worldwide’s history.

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Click on the image to watch a short video about "Beyond the Still" and the Cannes ad festival.

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The contest, as you know, is like a video version of the game exquisite corpse, created by the Surrealists, in which an artist would make a drawing and then mail it to another artist, who would add on to the artwork and send it on to yet another artist, so that the final piece is a collaborative effort, yet the participants have communicated with each other only through their work. In this case, Canon gave Vincent a still and asked him to create a story with the photo as his starting point. And then they opened it up to the whole world and asked people to compete to create the next “chapter,” continuing the story from the last frame of Vincent’s film. And so on. (The contest is still going on. Details here.)
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Click on the image to watch the video.

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Aptly titled “Beyond the Still,” the contest performed above and beyond anyone’s expectations, according to Grey: “The first month alone spawned a tidal wave of entries, and Canon EOS 7D weekly sales exploded, increasing by 88% since the contest launched, making it the #1 selling DSLR in the world. Huge spikes in sales also spilled over to the Rebel T2i and 5D Mark II.”

Here’s a combination of two interviews I did with Vincent and Nick Childs, EVP, director of branded content, at Grey, about how the contest came together and what the awards mean.

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Click on the image to watch the video.

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Vincent Laforet: While I’ve been working in advertising for close to five years, this was the first time that I actually went into an advertising agency to pitch them an idea of my own. I had benefited from pretty tremendous success with Reverie and Nocturne, so I went to Grey and said I wanted to find a way to share the excitement about this new breed of camera/filmmaking with others out there. Basically, I said:  “Why don’t we work on something that involves other people?” I had never made a pitch like that before, and to see it find this kind of success—never mind win these awards—is a pretty big deal for me on a personal level.

Nick Childs: When the 7D launched with this campaign, Vincent’s film showed not only what the capabilities were—it challenged people to join him and tell their own story, and now they had a targeted goal and tool to do it with. We were inviting them in and asking them to join his narrative. We wanted people to feel excited about shooting something in reaction to the first chapter and for them to feel like we were challenging them to “beat” Vincent’s film.

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Click on the image to watch the video.

Click on the image to watch the video.

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Vincent: The presentation I made to Grey when I pitched the idea was basically a passionate speech saying, “Listen, I have benefited tremendously from these new cameras, and my career has forever been changed by them. And with a high-quality camera like the 7D now affordable to the masses, it really is the democratization of filmmaking. We’ve got to do something big, something that everyone can become involved in.”

Nick: I knew the audience was out there—that anytime Vincent shoots something, there’s a mass of people already engaged and waiting to see how it looks—and that we could grow that active audience. So we met with Vincent over the next few weeks after his presentation to figure out a good platform to reach them, and engage them, instead of simply placing the brand inside the content.

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Chapter 5. Click on the image to watch the video.

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Vincent: I feel incredibly fortunate because I know these Cannes awards will likely help my commercial career as a director. The big thing in Hollywood right now is finding directors who not only have talent but can bring an audience to a project. I’ve already been approached by a company to speak with them about viral marketing.

Nick: I think Canon is thrilled with how “Beyond the Still” turned out. We all are. Anytime we all push hard for something less traditional, there’s a bit more apprehension, but trying something new, especially in digital areas, allows for a potentially more interesting outcome. So to help lead a nontraditional project like “Beyond the Still, and then win awards that reward us both for doing the best-quality work against all the traditional work produced in a given year and for being forward-thinking—it’s a huge success.

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Want to submit a video for Chapter 6? Here’s the still you need to work from:

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Related:
• “Beyond The Still” contest wins Silver Lion at Cannes!

• “Beyond The Still” Wins another Cannes Lion – A GOLD – here’s why YOU should care…

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