Challenge

Despite passes for the Cannes Lions Festival being financially out of reach for many industry professionals, people still flock to the city passless every year in hopes of joining fringe events and meeting other professionals. In 2022, IAA Global and Cannes Lions teamed up with the non-profit ACT to create Open House For Good (OHFG), an initiative that opens up corporation-sponsored venues to the public—no pass needed—to host discussions around social and environmental good. The OHFG team came to Proto for an identity and campaign to help the initiative communicate its values and stand out at the festival.

Solution

How do you get people’s attention at the loudest creative event of the year? An event where every major brand is shouting? By empowering the actual creative talent to shout louder. We created a verbally driven identity and campaign system that leans into their initials, and designed a logo that resembles the attention-grabbing phrase, OMFG!

This tongue-in-cheek logo allows them to make a statement (well, many cheeky statements) with a human tone of voice and an excessively bold visual system that embraces the hyperbole and excessive hype associated with Cannes Lions. It's the vernacular of the very people that can change the world with their creative potential. And now they have been granted permission, and given access to parts of the festival that often excludes them.

Grass roots change begins by letting them in – to both the festival and on the joke. And OHFG’s initiative and outrageous identity does just that. The system is designed to stop you in your tracks (quite literally by those who picketed on the Palais) all in service of the people. Because creativity doesn’t live in festivals, it lives in the talented people that just need a way into them.