Cannes Lions: Creative Data winners 2018 /

The Times / News UK & Ireland has scooped the Grand Prix in the Creative Data category at Cannes Lions for its JFK Unsilenced campaign. Created by Accenture Interactive’s agency Rothco, Dublin, the campaign uses AI to recreate the speech that US president John F Kennedy was about to make the day he was assassinated in 1963.

The ‘lost’ Dallas Trade Mart speech was created by feeding an AI system with 831 voice recordings of JFK’s speeches and interviews. The system then used this data to synthesise the speech.

‘We felt that it made sense for the brand creatively and strategically,’ explained jury president Marc Maleh, global director of Havas.

JFK Unsilenced generated 4,500 registrations to The Times & The Sunday Times. Results were an important consideration for the jury, who also wanted to award work that would inspire the next generation of marketers.

Maleh explained that there had been some heated debate among the jury about the ethical implications of creating new content from old data points. The jury also had many conversations about defining what data meant in this context.

Other winners, who all have been awarded Gold Lions, include:

Destination Pride / FCB/Six, Toronto

Project Revoice / BWM Dentsu, Sydney

Know What Your Data Knows / ELEVEN, San Francisco

Gene Project / Adam&eveDDB, London