Year one of our campaign for Nokia’s Nseries line of phones had a simple brief: Make Nokia’s formerly no-frills sponsorship of the Young Lions Film Competition at Cannes Lions 2007 into a larger content campaign. We came up with an integrated concept documenting the competition, including online content, print-mobile activation, over 90 viral web/mobisodes and a 30-minute branded MTV special that aired in more than 150 countries.

Nokia’s sponsorship package included onsite signage, print ads, and the right to shoot documentary footage of the competition. We bent a lot of rules with Nokia and Cannes Lions organizers to transform simple sponsorship into a global integrated content campaign with an audience of millions. At the festival, we created a mobile-active, 80-foot installation and used that along with print ads to lead viewers into mobile content about the teams and the phones they were shooting with. To generate awareness beyond the festival, we cut 90 short viral webisodes (shot with the mobile phones and edited on-site) telling the story of each team’s progression and then turned them into a 30 minute TV show aired as part of the MTV Switch campaign (their pro-social initiative to combat climate change).