How to win awards when you can’t enter awards

Dr Mumbo has, as regular readers will know, always been a fan of awards competitions.

So he was deeply sad for the staff of Publicis Groupe when it announced a one-year cost-saving awards ban to save up for an artificial intelligence platform.

Luckily, creatives are nothing if not creative when it comes to finding ways for their work to end up in front of juries.

Take Publicis-owned agency Marcel. In June, before the ban kicked off, the Sydney agency won a Gold Lion in the Outdoor category of the Cannes Lions for its Air-Ink initiative for Singapore’s Tiger Beer – a campaign which harvested pollution from the air and recycled it into sprayable ink.