• by Steve McClellan  @mp_mcclellan, June 23, 2015

Turkey won its first Cannes Lions Grand Prix Tuesday, with three Istanbul-based agencies — Y&R Team Red, Mindshare and Random Works — and client Vodafone winning the Media Grand Prix for an app developed to combat domestic violence in the country.

The app, which is hidden inside a flashlight app and triggered by a shake of the phone, is designed to help women alert three trusted friends as to their whereabouts if they are in danger.  

Media Jury President Nick Emery, who is global CEO of WPP’s Mindshare, said the winning work “combined beautifully the invention of an NGO campaign with a corporate campaign. It had technology at its heart, a great idea and a fantastic media concept. It was adaptive, data rich and about mass personalization.”

The app also won gold for use of integrated media.

Also on Tuesday, the Festival of Creativity awarded its first Glass Grand Prix to Big Foot Films of Cairo for its “Don’t Touch The Pickle” campaign for Procter & Gamble’s Whisper brand designed to help shatter myths in India about menstruation (one of which is that pickles will rot if touched by a menstruating woman).

The Glass Lion awards were introduced this year to recognize work aimed at gender bias.

Glass Jury President Cindy Gallop, founder and CEO of IfWeRanTheWorld/MakeLoveNotPorn, said that after “long debate at the end of the day we were absolutely unanimous that this prize deserved to go to the work that tackled head on a gender issue that impacts every single woman in the world and does it in an extraordinarily creative, innovative and disruptive way while being immensely entertaining and engaging and does it in a market where this particular issue is especially tough to challenge and change and did it and effected real change.”

The Cannes Lions Grand Prix for Creative Effectiveness went to Forsman Bodenfors and Folke Film Stockholm,  the makers of the Volvo Trucks campaign that was designed to demonstrate the brand’s steering capabilities by having actor Jean-Claude Van Damme do a split astride two trucks.

Wendy Clark, the Creative Effectiveness jury president and president, Sparkling Brands and Strategic Marketing Coca-Cola North America, said that “what we saw in the Grand Prix is that you could do the highest form of creativity and could also deliver the highest results. So our belief as a jury and I believe as an industry is that we have to find the highest intersection of that and not the lowest common denominator.”

The Grand Prix Lion in the Outdoor category was awarded to TBWA\Media Arts Lab and Apple Cupertino for a global campaign that featured photos taken by consumers on iPhone 6s. The campaign displayed photos on 1,000 installations in 73 cities across 25 countries.

Commenting on this year’s competition Juan Carlos Ortiz, the Outdoor Jury President and President and CEO DDB Latina  said that “when you have a range like this finding a game changer is going to be easy not chose for the winner because the winner is going to choose us.”

The Grand Prix Lion in the PR category went to a group led by Publicis Groupe’s MSL Group (which included Leo Burnett and Starcom MediaVest Group) for the “Like a Girl” campaign for Proctor & Gamble’s Always brand. The campaign also won two Gold Lions for Integrated PR and Media Digital Content.

Lynne Anne Davis, the PR Jury president and president and senior partner FleishmanHillard Asia Pacific, said that “when the jury asked of each campaign why did this matter one answered in the deepest and most meaningful way. It was the absolute best example of a brand inserting itself in the popular culture because it struck a chord with a cultural truth that transcends brands and to touch half the world’s population with a message of empowerment that will last generations. This campaign shows the world how change happens with the power of new PR.”

More on the winners and short-listed entries can be found here.