Cannes Lions: Titanium winners 2022 /

Engine, London has won the Grand Prix in the Titanium category on the final day of the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity. In its winning campaign, Long Live the Prince, Kiyan Prince, a promising footballer who was killed in a knife attack at the age of 15, is brought back to life as a player in the video game FIFA.

In May 2021, on the fifteenth anniversary of Prince’s death, a character designed to represent him as the 30-year-old player he could have become was released in the game. In the game, Kiyan plays for Queens Park Rangers, the club he belonged to as a boy. The agency also worked with a range of partners on the project, from EA Sports to Adidas, JD Sports, Match Attax football cards, in order to give Prince the same range of sponsorship and promotional treatment a living contemporary would receive.

The aim of the campaign is to reach kids who aren’t consuming traditional media and are desensitised to the usual narrative around knife crime. The media interest in the idea and the opportunity to play the game as Kiyan increases its potential to engage the target audience. Meanwhile, the sponsorship deals were used to raise funds for The Kiyan Price Foundation which is run by Kiyan’s father Dr Mark Prince, OBE.

Titanium jury president Rob Reilly, global CCO for WPP, commented on the difficulty of connecting with the age-group this campaign set out to target: ‘Selling to teens is a very hard thing to do. You’ve got to find a way to almost sneak that purpose in.

‘That’s why we gave it the Grand Prix, because you know you’ve got to find a way to get to teens in a way that doesn’t turn them off: It almost has to feel undetectable.’

Reilly also invoked the vision Dan Wieden – the first Titanium jury president – originally had for the category, defining the Titanium Lions as ‘for work that makes the industry stop in its tracks and reconsider the way forward.’ In the case of Long Live the Prince, it was the collaborative nature of the work that Reilly felt aligned with that definition. ‘Multiple brands and multiple agencies and multiple partners… going forward I think that’s going to be more and more the way we’re going to have to work to get some of these ideas brought to life.’

Titanium Lions were awarded to:

Shah Rukh Khan-My-Ad for Cadbury Celebrations by Ogilvy, Mumbai

The Unfiltered History Tour for Vice Media by Dentsu, Bengaluru, Mumbai and Gurgaon

Dyslexic Thinking for Virgin Group by FCB Inferno, London

The First Smart Tactile Graphics Display for Dot / Dot Pad by Serviceplan Germany, Munich

The Lost Class for Change the Ref by Leo Burnett, Chicago