Since its launch in 1954, the annual Cannes Lions festival has served as a showcase for the best and brightest in the advertising world. The festival’s Titanium Lion award exemplifies that ambitious, innovative side of Cannes by honoring campaigns that have the potential to reshape how brands and agencies think about their customer engagement efforts.

This year, Braze congratulates three of our customers—Burger King, Domino’s, and HBO—on being named Titanium Lion award finalists. All three companies are nominated for game-changing campaigns that pushed the boundaries of advertising to deliver customer experiences that were both inventive and true to their respective brands.

Burger King’s Whopper Detour Campaign

In this innovative campaign, Burger King gave out one-cent Whoppers, but only if customers opened their app within 600 feet of a McDonald's. The Whopper Detour boosted the Burger King app to #1 on both Google Play and App Store, tripled mobile sales, and resulted in ROI of 37-to-1 for Burger King. To make it possible, Burger King geofenced 14,000 McDonald's and carried out a cross-channel campaign using Braze and Braze Alloys technical partners Branch, mParticle, and Radar. (For more details, check out Burger King’s Global CMO Fernando Machado’s piece in Adweek.)

Domino’s “Paving for Pizza” Campaign

Mixing social good with a dash of fun, Domino’s campaign encouraged customers to highlight potholes near them that could impede pizza delivery and gave out $5,000 grants to local governments to support repaving efforts. The effort drew more than 194,000 responses from customers, allowing Domino’s to pave roads in 13 cities to date and leading them expand the planned paving to include locations in all 50 states. The “Paving for Pizza” campaign resulted in a #1 post on Reddit and achieved more than 1 billion media impressions for Domino’s, including more than 63 million local media impressions.

HBO’s “#ForTheThrone” Campaign

Ahead of the premier of Game of Thrones’ final season, HBO built a unique campaign out of three interrelated activations. From building an onsite GOT–inspired world at this year’s SXSW to encourage attendees to donate blood to the American Red Cross to allowing 18 artists to reimagine props from the show as works of visual art to collaborating with Budweiser on an unexpected (and unexpectedly dark) Super Bowl commercial, HBO embraced creativity to create a coordinated, cross-platform promotional experience.

Final Thoughts

The 2019 Titanium Lion finalists go beyond traditional advertising to celebrate creativity’s central role in building innovative, engaging customer experiences—and showcasing how technology can support these dream-big marketing moments. Embracing this kind of approach is expected to be a major focus of this year’s Cannes Lions festival and Braze will be on the ground, sharing data-driven insights and promoting conversation. Check out our article on the 2019 festival to learn more about what we’re up to.