Jury president, Beth Keamy, chief digital officer at TBWA\Media Arts Lab, outlined several trends that shaped this year’s Social & Creator Lions. The jury placed a strong emphasis on work built natively for social platforms, rather than campaigns simply broadcasting on them. ‘We really challenged ourselves as a group to interrogate, could this idea have worked in any other category without the social components? And if it could, then it probably wasn't going to rise to the top in ours. And that deep, deep embedding in the social landscape was what we were looking for across the board.’
They sought entries that reflected the full diversity of social environments. One shift this year was brands showing greater courage in handing creative control to their communities. A clear takeaway was that humour, timing and nuance can punch above their weight, even alongside big-budget work. Keamy said, ‘One of the things that we noticed is the increasing embrace of brands to trust their audiences to play with their brands a little bit, and it takes great bravery, and it takes great courage to cede control of your brand a little bit to your community.’
She added, ‘One of the things that really cut through for us as a jury was the work that grounded itself in a singular creative idea and paired that with undeniable deep craft in its execution, and what deep craft looks like in the social space is it is an unbelievable detailed acknowledgement of the platforms and the behaviours that exist in them. We spent a lot of time, not looking at the case studies and not looking at the write ups, but pulling up the actual posts themselves, pulling up the Reddit threads, looking at the TikToks, making sure the flurry of 15 comments we store in the case study were actually the comments that existed natively in that community.’
A key question for the jury was whether a brand was simply replicating a behaviour or building something from it. As Keamy put it, ‘Replication of a social trend or behaviour is table stakes in the industry at this point. Brands that rise to the top saw something, identified something in the way that their customers were behaving online, but then took that and elevated it, took that and played with it.’
