Jury president Pats McDonald, global chief strategy officer at Dentsu Creative, talked about the key criteria used to determine this year’s winners for the category.
‘We wanted work that knows the audience deeply, knows the algorithm, uses and embraces AI as a partner, and work with bold ambition at its heart, and we found it in this year’s winners.’
She added, ‘We found work with deep, intimate, local insight that scales beautifully because it is so authentic and so human. We found work that embraces the algorithm, wins with the algorithm, but doesn’t chase the algorithm. It doesn't chase the latest trend, the latest hashtag, the latest meme. We found work that uses AI as a partner in possibility to create work that is joyful and provocative, work that couldn't have been possible in previous years… Most importantly, we found work that should make us all deeply optimistic about the future of our industry, and the Grand Prix embodies each and every one of those characteristics, again and again.’
Giving additional insights as to what made Dove stand out, she said: ‘The Grand Prix was very hard to argue about and the reason it’s so hard to argue with is it has set the standard. It has written the playbook in modern strategy for 20 years now. It starts with an incredibly simple, devastating insight, just 2% of women see themselves as beautiful. It builds from there to make powerful ambition to make beauty a source of confidence. It is relentlessly consistent, but it reinvents itself with every new generation and with every shift in culture. It embraces technology, but it does it in service of human truth.’
