Cannes Lions

Made by Many worked with Ascential, then Cannes Lions’ parent company, for three years during its shift from events and publishing to digital business intelligence. After we rebuilt the festival app in 2016, Ascential brought us back with a double brief: turn Cannes Lions’ content, data and industry relationships into a platform business and a new source of recurring revenue, and build the in-house team to run it. The instruction was ‘teach them everything you know.’

Its richest asset was the Cannes Lions archive, fifty years of award entries and more than 250,000 campaigns and over a million individual entries, along with benchmarks and effectiveness data, sat scattered across legacy systems and third parties. The archive itself was locked in a product so hard to use that fewer than 0.28% of the people who engaged with Cannes Lions each year ever touched it.

We worked first as the product team Ascential did not yet have, then as one team with the people we helped them hire, bringing product strategy, user research, product design, data engineering and software engineering together across thirteen months of research, design and build.

We defined the proposition and the business model as well as the product: a paid intelligence service pairing award-winning creative work with measurement and effectiveness insight, built for subscription, retention and cross-sell.

The product stands on rebuilt data. We cleaned the archive, removed mass duplication and reorganised it from award entries into campaigns, unified with benchmarking and performance data, so users can cut it by campaign, agency, brand and person. Search and filters do the heavy lifting, new cloud infrastructure streams video globally, and a paywall put five decades of historic content on sale. For the first time, winning work could be published on the night it won.

The Work took 40,000 sign-ups around launch, and one of the major holding companies bought a group licence for more than a thousand seats. In its first year it grew subscription revenue 56% and paid back 75% of the investment. We handed over after Cannes 2018, and Ascential’s team has run and extended the platform ever since, building new data, intelligence and insight products on it beyond the annual event.